Which of Saturn's Icy satellite flybys are you most looking forward too and why?

I can't wait to see Mimas up close, I hope the flyby geometry will give us a good view of the giant crater Herchel.

Iapetus. with its black-and-white appearance and possible GIGANTIC mountains

http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1386_1.asp

Alas, Sunspot is out of luck -- Mimas is the only one of Saturn's biggest 11 moons for which there is no close flyby (either targeted or untargeted) during Cassini's selected 4-year primary tour. The closest it will come is 45,000 km next Aug. 2. (I imagine a close Mimas flyby will be a prety high priority during any extended mission.)

As for the others, the flybys closer than 30,000 km are as follows:

Janus: Untargeted, 6/1/08 -- 13,600 km

Epimetheus: Untargeted, 12/3/07 -- 6200 km

Enceladus:
Untargeted, 2/17/05 -- 1200 km. (A remarkable piece of pure luck.)
Targeted, 3/9/05 -- 500 km
Targeted, 7/15/05 -- 1000 km
Targeted, 3/12/08 -- 1000 km

Tethys: Untargeted, 6/27/07 -- 16,200 km

Telesto:
Untargeted, 10/11/05 -- 10,100 km
Untargeted, 12/25/05 -- 18,900 km

Dione: Targeted, 10/11/05 -- 500 km

Helene: Untargeted, 7/20/07 -- 29,100 km

Rhea:
Targeted, 11/26/05 -- 500 km
Untargeted, 8/30/07 -- 5100 km

Hyperion: Targeted, 9/26/05 -- 1000 km

Iapetus: Targeted, 9/10/07 -- 1000 km

I should also mention the untargeted Iapetus flyby coming up this New Year -- 64,000 km range, but still by far the best look at Iapetus yet.

.....oh well, that flyby will still give us considerably better images than what we have now

I can't decide between Iapetus and Enceladus. I am interested to find out if Enceladus has ice volcanoes.

Obviously from my avatar you know where my heart lies (though I still prefer Io above all), but both Iapetus and Enceladus look really interesting though I think Iapetus will steal the early show.

Early show? we have to wait till 2007!

No, you only have to wait till December 30. You won't see super hi-res imaging but global mapping at 600 m/pixel is pretty good in my book

though if we , I don't know, find active volcanism on Titan (hey, you never know ), then....

My latest info from Mr. Denk (DLR berlin) about the Dec.30 Iapetus is, that the current Cassini trajectory was corrected to ensure that the Huygens probe (in free flight also near Iapetus at this time) takes the right trajectory to Titan. It is some uncertaintity in Iapetus mass, so they decided the Dec.30 flyby distance to take place in 115000 km instead of the proposed 50000 km. The northern hemisphäre of Iapetus would be visible instead of the southern. Also changing the Titan flyby of Dec.13 takes places in 1200km instead of 2200km (a thruster flyby instead of wheels)

regards
Robert Schulz
Vienna

Putting us on thrusters for the Tb flyby pretty much killed our very high resolution observations

Despite the change in distance and subspacecraft point for the Iapetus distant encounter, it should yield a lot of useful information on Iapetus.

Could this mean more RADAR observations? From what I understand, the camera performs best with reaction wheels while the RADAR instrument does better with thrusters.

Why are they even releasing Huygens before the distant Iapetus flyby?

If there is so much uncertainty in Iapetus's mass such that it could adversly affect the path of "free falling Huygens" - doesn't it make more sense to keep Huygens attached until the last possible moment and THEN release it?

It seems to me that even the slightest deviation from the planned course could drastically alter Huygen's decent profile. To be sure there is a narrow corridor for entry. Too much off, and poof, there goes the Huygens entry/surface mission.

With no way to correct Huygen's path, why take the risk?

When Huygens is released, Cassini is essentially on a collision course with Titan, then is steered away with a OTM a few days later. The shorter the time between release and encounter, the longer that burn has to be. The current date is the best compromise between making sure Huygens is put on the correct trajectory and maintaining Cassini's fuel reserve.

To "Pioneer": The Titan-B flyby is one of those that will not utilize radar. About 19 of the 44 Titan flybys, in fact, are currently scheduled to fall into this category. (I don't know why this early flyby was included in that group -- one would think that radar observations are somewhat more urgent early in the mission than later, given the lack of variation in the atmospheric properties of Titan compared to its vast surface variations.)

The camera didn't provide that good of a view of the surface, especially at high resolution, im surprised they havent decided to use more of the other instruments that show the surface in greater clarity and detail. Im guessing it's too late to make changes to instrument observing schedules?

oh ye of little faith. Yes, they take a bit longer to process then say, Iapetus or Tethys images, but its getting there.

In terms of observing schedules, at least for Tb, it is too late to change them though later in the mission things could be shifted around.

Well, no matter HOW much you process Cassini's 1-micron ISS images (no offense, Jason), it's now excruciatingly clear from http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06982 that the clearest optical views of Titan -- by an enormous margin -- will come not from those images but from the VIMS images taken at 2 microns. (Although the caption doesn't make this clear, those two images were taken of the same place simultaneously by VIMS at 1 and 2 microns -- and the resolution of the 2-micron image is about 1 km/pixel, approaching that of the SAR radar.) I wonder what THOSE images will look like after they've been fully processed?

Yes, the view is much clearer at 2 microns. However, their footprints are MUCH smaller. So ISS is very good at making regional scale images while VIMS is good for making postage stamp views at 400 m/pixel. Note to future Titan orbiter team: include 2 micron camera... However, there is much to be gained by using ISS. When you see what VIMS is looking at, it will become abundantly clear that VIMS's "better than ISS" coverage will cover a very small portion of Titan, even after 44 flybys.

Actually, the problem with VIMS is that it's a "pushbroom" imager -- unlike the ISS cameras, which take an instantaneous 2-D image -- which means that, to build up a 2-D VIMS image, you either have to keep scanning the same line with VIMS as Titan's surface rolls by underneath you (which is unacceptably slow when Cassini is still fairly far from Titan), or else (for long-range views) keep scanning that one VIMS line while actually tilting the spacecraft, which is awkward. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake not to add an optional tiltable mirror to VIMS to allow it to construct long-range 2-D images quickly and easily.

However, even where long-distance 2-micron VIMS views of Titan are concerned, they got quite a nice one at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gs2.cgi....jpg&type=image .