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AVIATR - Titan Airplane Mission Concept, Proposed unmanned aerial exploration of Titan
Juramike
post Apr 16 2010, 12:20 AM
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The AVIATR mission concept is an unmanned aerial vehicle that would fly over Titan’s surface. It’s nominal one year mission would enable detailed high-resolution images of Titan’s diverse landscapes for better comparison to Earth’s geological processes. Selected regions could be imaged at resolutions near 30 cm/pixel, equivalent to current HiRise imaging of Mars. In addition, atmospheric sampling would allow a profile of Titan’s thick lower atmosphere and how it relates to Earth’s atmospheric processes and weather systems.

Further details of the AVIATR mission concept were presented at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference 2010 and at Titan Through Time 2010.
See: Barnes et al. LPSC 41 (2010) Abstract 2551. “AVIATR: Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance.”
Freely available here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2010/pdf/2551.pdf

And also: http://www.info.uidaho.edu/documents/2010%...18467&doc=1


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Some higher resolution images available at my photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/
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djellison
post Jun 23 2010, 04:16 PM
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You're not going to get 30cm resolution from orbit around Titan. Furthermore, you're not going to get 3mm resolution from an aircraft. Infact, I've never ever heard of an aircraft getting 3mm/pixel on EARTH, let alone on Titan. Google Earth imagery is mainly aerial photography, and is typically at about 25cm/pixel - maybe 12.5cm in some places. That's still a factor of 40 (1600x fewer pixels) lower than the 3mm you're suggesting. If you COULD - you wouldn't need a 10 or 100 fold increase in data return - you would need 10,000 fold increase.

Covering just 0.1% of Titan's surface at 3mm/pixel, at 8 bits per pixel, with 10:1 compression?

83,000 sqkm. At 72 Gigabits per sqkm. 5,976 TERRABITS of data.

At 30cm/pixel 0.0072 Gigabits per sqKm. 598 Gigabits.

MRO with it's huge high gain antenna, in our back-garden at Mars (compared to a flight to Titan) has sent back just 42 Gigabits of data to date.

I'm afraid your expectations are unrealistic, and your engineering suggestions are just in the wrong place in terms of complexity, feasibility etc given the budget, mass, volume etc.

If we're going to go back to Titan, I don't think AVIATR is the way to do it. The way to do it is with TSSM, so you can have the montgolfière + an orbiter for relay. You're still not going to get anywhere near your requirements. But you've going to get a lot more data, that's for sure.
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Jason W Barnes
post Jun 28 2010, 04:23 AM
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QUOTE (djellison @ Jun 23 2010, 09:16 AM) *
If we're going to go back to Titan, I don't think AVIATR is the way to do it. The way to do it is with TSSM, so you can have the montgolfière + an orbiter for relay. You're still not going to get anywhere near your requirements. But you've going to get a lot more data, that's for sure.


I'd love to have a $4 Billion dollar Titan mission! But unfortunately, TSSM is dead. We're going to Europa instead.

The question now becomes: do we wait and hold our breath demanding a new $4 Billion Titan mission, or do we explore piecemeal instead of all at once? Even if Europa flies on time, and that's a big if, a future Titan flagship wouldn't get a new start until after EJSM launches. That's in 2020. So say we get a new start in 2020. And we take 10 years building before we launch, too. Then we launch in 2030. We have a 7-year, Cassini-like cruise, say. Now it's 2037, and we're finally back at Titan with a flagship, if everything goes perfectly. The flagship has a 4-year nominal mission, say. Without any extended mission, it would end in 2041.

Who among us will still be alive then, and not in a nursing home? I'm pretty young as far as these things go, and I'd be 64 then if everything went like that.

Instead I suggest that we take another approach. The Mars Exploration Program was implemented after Mars Observer blew up in 1993, and they realized that they could put together a more compelling scientific program by flying a small mission every 26 months rather than a giant mission every 20 years. This approach has been so successful that today more planetary dollars are spent at Mars than for any other target, by far. When you stop to think about it, this is pretty amazing. As recently as the mid-'90s it was not clear that Mars would become the focus of the American planetary program. The smaller, more frequent Mars missions keep the scientific community interested, have less programmatic risk, and allow follow-ups on previous discoveries in a human lifetime. They built an amazing program. Then they pissed it all away with MSL. But I digress.

We should be exploring Titan the same way as we used to explore Mars. One reason to do this is that we can. Numerous mission concept studies have shown that you can't get anything even into orbit around Europa for less than $1B. By the time that you get into orbit around Europa, the radiation will fry you in 6 months. This is why EJSM is going to cost $3B and only live for 6 months -- it's inherent in the physics of getting to Europa and doing science there.

In contrast Titan is easy to get to and explore. AVIATR is going to just fly straight into Titan's atmosphere without any engine burns at all. Just like Mars Pathfinder, or Mars Phoenix, or the MER rovers. Moreover Titan's atmosphere is so light and fluffy that we'll have very low heat loads and accelerations on entry -- 5 times easier than the easiest Mars entry. This is why it's possible to get to Titan on a Discovery budget.

If we launch a Discovery or New Frontiers class Titan mission every 5 years or so, we'll be in a great position to do amazing and sustainable science, on a budget that might actually get approved, and on a timescale over which we'll still be alive to care!

- Jason W. Barnes
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Posts in this topic
- Juramike   AVIATR - Titan Airplane Mission Concept   Apr 16 2010, 12:20 AM
- - Juramike   This is an artist's impression of the AVIATR a...   Apr 16 2010, 12:23 AM
- - nprev   ...niiiiiiiice!!!! Sweet image, Mi...   Apr 16 2010, 12:33 AM
|- - vjkane   Also check out http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2...   Apr 16 2010, 06:08 AM
- - Juramike   Image showing the proposed AVIATR Titan airplane f...   Apr 20 2010, 03:14 AM
- - Juramike   Recent video showing NASA's Global Hawk UAV re...   Apr 30 2010, 01:12 PM
- - Juramike   Smithsonian Air and Space article on Titan AVIATR ...   May 20 2010, 05:35 PM
- - Juramike   Video of Jason Barnes presenting the AVIATR missio...   Jun 13 2010, 03:32 AM
- - Juramike   Future Planetary Exploration blog entry on AVIATR ...   Jun 17 2010, 01:44 PM
- - algorimancer   I'm really bothered by the very low (2 Gb) pro...   Jun 23 2010, 01:30 PM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (algorimancer @ Jun 23 2010, 06:30 ...   Jun 28 2010, 03:51 AM
||- - algorimancer   QUOTE (Jason W Barnes @ Jun 27 2010, 10:5...   Jun 28 2010, 05:45 PM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (algorimancer @ Jun 23 2010, 06:30 ...   Jun 28 2010, 04:07 AM
|- - rlorenz   QUOTE (Jason W Barnes @ Jun 27 2010, 11:0...   Jul 11 2010, 02:45 PM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (rlorenz @ Jul 11 2010, 07:45 AM) H...   Jul 12 2010, 01:29 AM
|- - rlorenz   QUOTE (Jason W Barnes @ Jul 11 2010, 09:2...   Jul 12 2010, 12:20 PM
- - djellison   You're not going to get 30cm resolution from o...   Jun 23 2010, 04:16 PM
|- - Drkskywxlt   QUOTE (djellison @ Jun 23 2010, 11:16 AM)...   Jun 23 2010, 05:08 PM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (djellison @ Jun 23 2010, 09:16 AM)...   Jun 28 2010, 04:23 AM
- - stevesliva   Note that the figure is two gigabytes, and calling...   Jun 23 2010, 04:52 PM
- - djellison   I was going from http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/ (b...   Jun 23 2010, 06:00 PM
|- - Drkskywxlt   QUOTE (djellison @ Jun 23 2010, 01:00 PM)...   Jun 23 2010, 06:25 PM
- - djellison   The internet hates me.   Jun 23 2010, 06:27 PM
|- - algorimancer   Doug, my intent wasn't to suggest 30mm/pixel r...   Jun 23 2010, 08:18 PM
- - jekbradbury   It's certainly a shame the mass spectrometer c...   Jun 28 2010, 02:59 PM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (jekbradbury @ Jun 28 2010, 07:59 A...   Jun 29 2010, 10:15 PM
- - Juramike   AVIATR image posted in Planetaria blog: http://we...   Jun 30 2010, 04:54 PM
- - Drkskywxlt   Jason (or anybody in the know) -- What is the exp...   Jun 30 2010, 05:35 PM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (Drkskywxlt @ Jun 30 2010, 10:35 AM...   Jul 1 2010, 08:27 PM
- - Jason W Barnes   Another point of comparison for missions' data...   Jul 9 2010, 08:30 AM
- - Greg Hullender   Forgive my ignorance, but shouldn't the resolu...   Jul 12 2010, 08:58 PM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Jul 12 2010, 01:5...   Jul 12 2010, 11:21 PM
|- - rlorenz   QUOTE (Jason W Barnes @ Jul 12 2010, 06:2...   Jul 13 2010, 12:46 AM
- - nprev   Speaking as a layperson, very interesting discussi...   Jul 13 2010, 01:00 AM
- - Greg Hullender   I think I see. Part of my confusion is that, in th...   Jul 13 2010, 02:33 PM
|- - vjkane   Properly speaking, resolution should be interprete...   Jul 13 2010, 09:08 PM
|- - rlorenz   QUOTE (Greg Hullender @ Jul 13 2010, 10:3...   Jul 14 2010, 04:54 PM
- - Juramike   Artists impression of AVIATR aeroshell and parachu...   Sep 7 2010, 03:58 AM
- - Juramike   Artistic impression of AVIATR Titan Airplane over ...   Sep 28 2010, 03:28 AM
- - Juramike   Reworked some of the AVIATR images with the latest...   Jun 10 2011, 01:11 AM
- - Juramike   Link to OPAG AVIATR mission presentation slides by...   Nov 19 2011, 06:16 PM
|- - ngunn   Some of your images there Mike? Don't be shy...   Nov 19 2011, 10:58 PM
- - nprev   Nice. I'd like to see this one fly (literally)...   Nov 20 2011, 12:23 AM
|- - Jason W Barnes   QUOTE (nprev @ Nov 19 2011, 06:23 PM) Onl...   Nov 24 2011, 01:39 AM
- - stevesliva   Uses an ASRG now. First nuclear plane. That...   Nov 20 2011, 03:53 AM
- - nprev   Ah! Thanks, Jason; feelin' warmer & fu...   Nov 24 2011, 01:59 AM
- - Mongo   I wonder if, instead of a virtually financially im...   Nov 26 2011, 02:35 AM
|- - Paolo   QUOTE (Mongo @ Nov 26 2011, 03:35 AM) I a...   Nov 26 2011, 05:07 PM
|- - vjkane   QUOTE (Mongo @ Nov 25 2011, 06:35 PM) I w...   Dec 24 2011, 09:46 PM
- - vjkane   Your idea of a number of lower cost missions has b...   Nov 26 2011, 05:00 PM
- - nprev   Guys, in the name of keeping this thread on topic,...   Nov 26 2011, 05:09 PM
- - Jason W Barnes   The AVIATR team has published a paper about the mi...   Dec 23 2011, 11:25 PM
|- - vjkane   Jason - Has your team every looked into including...   Dec 24 2011, 06:02 AM
- - stevesliva   Interesting that the Mongolfiere requires an MMRTG...   Dec 24 2011, 02:43 AM
- - Greg Hullender   We're looking far enough in the future that la...   Dec 25 2011, 07:13 PM
- - nprev   (sigh)...Guys, once again, please keep this thread...   Dec 25 2011, 10:26 PM
- - Juramike   AVIATR mission concept written up in Universe Toda...   Jan 3 2012, 02:06 AM
- - Juramike   space.com article: http://www.space.com/14191-tit...   Jan 11 2012, 04:48 PM
- - nprev   Great write-up & illustrations. Congrats, Jaso...   Jan 11 2012, 06:22 PM


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