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LEXLOTHOR — Voyager Titan
Published: 2009-04-28 22:49:21 +0000 UTC; Views: 996; Favourites: 22; Downloads: 17
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More of my technical illustration can be seen in this gallery:[link]
I drew this picture just before the Voyager 1 encounter with Saturn's large moon Titan in 1980. This was the fanciful surface that I had hoped to see. It was an amalgum of features imaged a year before among Jupiter's Galilean moons. Unfortunately atmospheric haze prevents the surface of Titan from ever being seen from space via visible wavelengths.
I had to wait 25 YEARS for the Cassini orbiter to prove me wrong.
art (c) John P. Alexander
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Comments: 18
I drew this picture approximately one month BEFORE the encounter of Voyager 1 with Saturn. My imagination was filling in the unknowns at the time. Unfortunately Voyager 1 only took close up pictures of atmospheric haze. The scientific world had to 33 years for the true picture to emmerge with the Cassini spacecraft observations.
The worst part of this story is that a potential trajectory to Neptune and Pluto was sacrificed in order to obtain a close flyby of Titan.
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Titan must be a wonderful place to visit, to bad it's so far away and cold.
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The images of Titan that have been returned from the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens probe show a very earth-like surface with rivers and lakes of liquid methane. The equatorial regions have dune fields like the Sahara, but they are made out of ice grains rather than sand. It probably rains liquid ethane each time Titan passes into the shadow of Saturn.
If another spacecraft were to be sent to Saturn, it should be being built NOW, in order to make the Jupiter gravity assist window that will open in the next decade.
You may also like some of my kitty photos:
[link]
I also have lots of flower photos in my "Photography" gallery.
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yeah, i know all about the mysterious of Titan that it holds, cuz i love astronomy. at the moment, Titan must be in its long Summer season, cuz even though its a cold place, its Climate is actually acting like a hot Earth. i guess its northern hemisphere is recieving much of the sunlight, cuz there are identified lakes of ethane on its southern hemisphere. but yes, it can be that ethane rains when its is shadowed by saturn, however it may not too as its climate is pretty stable. i wonder if their is active cycrovolcanism at the moment, to sustain such a rich atmosphere. i wish they send a stronger probe their to catch more pics of its illusive surface.
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I am just glad to see the Cassini results. In the early Eighties I recognized that a Saturn orbiter could get radar images of at least half the surface of Titan without actually orbiting the moon. I did not expect the cold desert scenario.
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will they ever map the entire moon, like they did with Venus?
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There are Titan radar mapping orbiter concepts currently on paper. But for such a mission to become reality NASA or ESA would have to start seeking government funding NOW.
The Jupiter-Saturn gravity assist launch window opens once every 20 years. Voyagers 1 & 2 were launched in 1977 for assists in 1979 and 1980. Cassini was launched in 1997 (and after zipping around the inner Solar system) it made the 2000-2001 Jupiter assist. BTW: That was the launch widow described in Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: a Space Odyssey".
If a new Saturn/Titan mission is to be conducted within the next FORTY years, it would have to be launched no later that 2018! development time is so slow, that a new start on the project would have to begin withing the next 2 years.
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Voyager 1 sacrificed the chance to visit planets beyond Saturn. The course maneuver that permitted a close flyby of Titan threw it out of the plane of the eccliptic. Voyager 2 went on from Saturn to visit Uranus and Neptune.
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And I made drawings of the Voyager 2 spacecraft encountering the ice giants for my gallery too. That interplanetary mission was the best of my lifetime. There is also talk of launching a Neptune Triton orbiter in 2014, to reach Neptune in . . . 2035. *sighs*
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The Grand Tour opportunity occurs only once in almost 2 centuries. I'm afraid that no mission beyond Saturn will be attempted (or certainly completed)again in my lifetime. New Horizons to Pluto is a flyby that won't have to decelerate at its destination so it is traveling faster than any previous planetary probe.
Uranus and Neptune will have to wait until nuclear magnetic plasma propulsion is available for constant acceleration.
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Time and tide wait for no man.
The flight time for getting from Earth to Saturn via a Hohmann transfer orbit takes over a decade. This is prohibitive.
A launch opportunity for a space craft to travel to Saturn in less than half that time opens roughly once every 20 years. This is by using a gravity assist from Jupiter. The Voyagers were launched in 1979. Cassini was lauched in 1997. The next such launch window opens around 2018.
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It sure was a long time for someone like Nelson from The Simpsons to point at you and go "Ha Ha!"
Jag
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