[X] My Assistant

[Del Palmer]

The mission flyby description is now up.

975 km altitude, focusing on the southern hemisphere, lots of RADAR observations including a bit of SAR...

[edstrick]

The radar data frustrates the <expletive deleted> out of me, cause it's clear you really need much better than 100 meter resolution to really see the important geological details in most terrains. A future orbiter should plan to map all of Titan at 100 meter resolution, at worst, with sample capability <and the ability to build up local high-rez maps -- the whole return ultimately bandwidth-to-earth limited> at better than 25 meter resolution.

Of course, the CCD imaging frustrates me more, as we need a framing color camera with the same resolution in the 1.5 to 5 micrometer middle infrared. Impossible when Cassini was being built, possible now. We just can't see Titan's surface well enough, but we can see enough to make agonized progress and with swear-buckets full of qualifications. We're gonna have to make do for now. It's just that simple.

[dvandorn]

Impossible when Cassini was being built, possible now.

Testimony to how it's just not possible to design a one-size-fits-all interplanetary probe, mix up the sensors a bit, and fly the same thing to a different place every few years.

It's not just a matter of pulling one camera off and sticking another one on -- changing camera technology means changes to signal conditioning, data processing, transmission encoding, etc., etc. And that's not even considering the advances made from year to year in each of *those* technologies, either.

These things are designed to do certain things as efficiently as possible with not a milligram more mass than is absolutely necessary to do those things. That means they have to be specially designed to their tasks, each one unique to its mission.

If we were flying five to ten a year, an adjustable one-size-fits-all approach might work. But for flagship missions that fly every five to ten years? Nope.

-the other Doug