[X] My Assistant

[edstrick]

tallbear: "....However, the Cassin Tour will be altered in early 2006 and these opportunities may go away while others may appear.....

Uh... Say WHAT?....is this a branch to an entirely different series of encounters than the second half of the primary mission that they've been designing in (necessarily) obsessive-compulsive detail for the last decade? Did they have to retarget to make a close flyby of a Vogon Mothership? Or did they find a spinning blue telephone call-box floating in Saturn orbit? <grin!>

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

EcdentricAnomaly is, I believe, overlooking the point of my argument -- which is not that Iapetus' escape velocity is much lower than Titan's (which of course it is), but that it's much harder to use repeated gravity-assist flybys to previously get Cassini into an orbit close to Iapetus' in order to minimize flyby speed during the insertion burn. Indeed, in the case of Titan you can use not only gravity-assist flybys but also aerobraking for that purpose -- and so, if they don't think insertion into orbit around the moon is practical for Titan, it's certainly not for Iapetus.