Rev 199: Nov. 7- Dec. 17 '13, Titan's T96 flyby Options

[Val Klavans]

Rev199 can be found here: http://www.ciclops.org/view/7726/Rev199

We're finally receiving some good raws from Cassini again! I just put together these three views of Titan, from images snapped by Cassini yesterday (November 22): Three Views of Titan

[titanicrivers]

Beautiful imaging Val ! (and thanks for the link to how you did it!)

[Ian R]

Great stuff, Val

Here's my attempt to enhance the haze in a RGB composite using the UV channel:

[titanicrivers]

From the T96 mission overview http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/flybys/titan20131201/ "Titan approaches summer solstice. VIMS will also look for specular reflection in an area located to the east of Ara Fluctus, between latitudes 53 N and 48 N and between longitudes 130 W – 163 W. "
I wonder if that should be to the west of Ara Fluctus based on the coordinates given ??? (see IAU map below)

[titanicrivers]

The T96 flyby is already providing another ‘bonanza’ of North polar lakes on Titan. Two images from Nov 30 2013 taken with the CL1 CB3 filter are shown, one highlighting the intriguing Mackey Lacus, the other showing a panoply of smaller, sharply demarcated lakes. The SAR map http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/images/N...oboundaries.pdf is used to help identify the lakes.

EDIT: Although I did use the map with names above I still managed to spell Mackay Lacus wrong!

[titanicrivers]

A closer look at Mackay Lacus show what appears to be a string of small interconnected lakes surrounded by considerable evaporite (see http://www.ciclops.org/view_media/38701/Ti...akes-Salt-Flats )

[dilo]

Beautiful work, titancrivers!
Looking to these polar maps, I wonder there are so many "white" regions not covered by radar... do someone knows which is actual global coverage and if it will reach 100% of Titan surface before the End of Mission? (Sorry if question is slightly off-topic).

[elakdawalla]

Radar will never achieve 100% coverage of Titan. Coverage is good near the north pole because it was in the dark for the prime mission, but that didn't limit RADAR work there.

[Explorer1]

Yeah, don't expect 95% global coverage in Magellan's style. Flybys necessarily limit how much can be scanned even apart from the limited fuel and time for other instruments to do their work. Filling in every white space is largely academic, like getting the exact poles, etc.
Cassini can only ever do flybys, though I have vague recollections of some talk early in the mission about the possibility of aerocapture into Titan orbit at the end of the main mission, using the main antenna as a sort of heatshield. Dunno if it was anymore plausible than escaping Saturn for Uranus/Neptune/Centaurs....

[djellison]

I have vague recollections of some talk early in the mission about the possibility of aerocapture into Titan orbit at the end of the main mission, using the main antenna as a sort of heatshield. Dunno if it was anymore plausible than escaping Saturn for Uranus/Neptune/Centaurs....

None of the above are plausible.

[Explorer1]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I figured. There's a few old articles from before the first mission extension, a few journal articles about possible escape trajectories, etc. All academic, given that the real EOM has been settled upon...

[dilo]

... I have vague recollections of some talk early in the mission about the possibility of aerocapture into Titan orbit at the end of the main mission, using the main antenna as a sort of heatshield....

I hope like an aerobrake only, it would be frustrating to orbit around Titan without antenna for radar coverage! cool idea, anyway!

[nprev]

It's just not gonna happen. Even if this were possible to do the spacecraft would eventually crash onto Titan, and it's not sterilized to PPP standards.

Cassini's EOM will be very similar to that of Galileo.

[stevesliva]

though I have vague recollections of some talk early in the mission about the possibility of aerocapture into Titan orbit at the end of the main mission, using the main antenna as a sort of heatshield. Dunno if it was anymore plausible than escaping Saturn for Uranus/Neptune/Centaurs....

I recall there was a serious proposal to send Cassini to Uranus, in that someone who writes papers about that sort of thing had worked out the mechanics of it being possible. Though, in all seriousness, the science lost at Saturn meant that was never going to happen.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/artic...09457651200149X
http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/1.42893?journalCode=jsr

[0101Morpheus]

Uranus does strike me best destination to send Cassini to if that action had been approved. And it is almost tempting visit a planet we haven't been to in 27 years.

The main issue is escaping Saturn's gravity well, which would be really, really, hard. I remember reading somewhere that Cassini might have just enough fuel to do it but it would take several years. So put together several years of doing nothing but burning fuel and doing gravity assists to escape Saturn then fly toward Uranus, which would take considerably longer to get to than Voyager 2 since this is no longer the 1970's. And who knows what condition Cassini would be in when it arrived...yeah. It's better to stay at Saturn.

I am looking forward to riskier maneuvers with the spacecraft, like flying through the ring plane and I would kill to get another flyby of Iapetus, which is IMO the most mysterious of Saturn's moons now.

Figuratively of course.