Ahoy mateys!

NASA announces Discovery mission selection for Phase A.

Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) is among them. Har!

Long may this thread live! To 2023 and beyond!!!

Whatever floats your boat!

Congratulations! That is terrific news!

And a hearty cheer from me. I worked at sea for 17 years and nothing in solar system exploration excites me more than the prospect of sailing an other-worldly sea with the prospect of a huge science payoff.

Congratulations, Ralph, and also to your team!

Wow, Ralph, MAJOR congrats!!! This promises to be one of the most exciting missions ever!!!

Excellent! Something to really look forward to.
Read the NASA press release here: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2011/may/H...e_Plantary.html

I hope TiME gets chosen in 2016. Outer Planet mission > Inner Planet mission

I also prefer TiME to the other candidates. METNET can do some Martian geophysical studies and Rosetta/Philae can investigate a comet nucleus. But when's the next chance we'll get to see Titan up close other than this?


Edit: Oops, I forgot METNET was 100% meteorological! For some reason I thought it had a few geophysical instruments as well.

Depends on how old you are.

I'm on TiME's side, Ligeia Mare, here we come, don't forget your wellies
Targeted landing on moon so far... awesome undertaking... really hope she goes

I like all the selected missions, but TiME seems special in so many ways. The science, given the budget, seems compelling, but the public outreach!
I know the bandwidth will be low, but there is at least a simple imager on the mission isnt there? (yes, I know, all that may be nothing but a flat horizon all round and a dim cloudy sky, but to drift into view of a coastline before she gives out...(and she must be a she!)!

Actually has there been any work done on the possible entry ellipse and targeting accuracy yet? Is the desired target deep water....hydrocarbon...whatever....or a more littoral location?

Getting ahead of myself here...Congratulations Ralph and crew!

P

Congratulations Ralph and whole TiME team.
It's right time for TiME!

The real beauty of TiMe is that it's instrument package and environment would be perfectly scientifically complementary (synergistic with) all the other currently proposed Titan missions (baloon, JET, AVIATR airplane, future orbiter, etc.)

So if TiME is selected, it shouldn't hurt the chances of other proposed Titan missions from a purely scientific viewpoint.

I agree: of the three announced candidate missions, TiME really excites the imagination. I expect the images we get back would be pretty underwhelming : I picture something like the myopic postage stamps from the Huygens landing, except with the only visible scenery being a few ripples on a calm lake surface. But the idea of going to such a distant, alien location, and exploring in a way that has never been done before... That is exciting. This mission is about Exploration in the truest sense. I grew up thinking about space from the Star Trek perspective: "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." That is exactly what the TiME mission sounds like to me Well, minus the new civilizations, and probably [thought not quite certainly!] minus the new life forms. But certainly exploration of a strange new world. Contrast to the other mission proposals, which are more mundane planetary science. That is science with a small 's' : filling in details, trying to add a little bit onto the big pile of knowledge. Still interesting stuff, but not nearly so inspirational.

The descent images should be fantastic! Imagine seeing the shoreline in detail as the probe lands! Also, I'm thinking that eventually the floating probe may be blown onto shore. Hopefully the camera will have remained clear enough to get a good look. That's one thing I worry about, windblown and splashed stuff coating the optics.

Does anyone know what liquid methane/ethane is like at Titan surface temperatures? Is the picture we should have in mind like rubbing alcohol, or gasoline, or motor oil? Maple syrup? Molasses?

Gasoline. Not as viscous as water, even at those temperatures. And definitely not as "clingy" as water on glass. Any splashes of liquid on the lenses should creep right off. Not sure about any residual materials, however. But that's one of the reasons TiME is such an exciting mission: just what other things are in those lakes, anyway?

Moreover - TiME will be quite a warm thing - so heat will drive off and evaporate any splashes - residual residue isn't out of the question. The camera should be fairly high above the surface anyway, so it unlikely to get a splashing - especially given how smooth we know the lakes to be. Something over 500 watts of heat are involved in the 130 watts of electricity generated by the ASRG

When exactly can we expect the final mission selection? The press release just says that there will be another review next year, no month given.

I was under the impression that it would aim to splash down a long way from land, probably too far for the shoreline to be visible during descent. Also I seem to remember it being said that it would all happen in darkness or at most twilight. Am I misremembering? Of course any image at all would be nice but I'd still back the mission even if there were no images, just great chemistry.

"Earth & the Sun are above the horizon for the 3 month mission lifetime, during which TiME collects and transmits data on the lake and atmosphere." http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/pages/ima...Stofan-TIME.pdf

Of course even at noon it's twilight on Titan, especially at the pole, I imagine. But I expect the imaging system should be designed to get good pictures throughout the entire mission.

As far as distance from the shore, the Huygens panoramas cover quite a distance. I don't know how much better the Time descent images may be or how high the probe may be and still capture shots of the shoreline.

Thanks for those slides, Cents.

I'd actually call this mission a validation of the ASRG in three environments: space, alien atmosphere, and cryo hydrocarbon fluid exposure. Apparently, the ASRG provides enough power for DTE, which is a wow. Considering the fact that there's a Jupiter flyby in the trajectory, what are the odds of a teeny little ridealong cam, perhaps provided by another program...?

(Disclaimer: If such a cam would add too much complexity to systems integration, then fuggedaboudit. Prime mission is too exciting & important to screw around with.)

Actually, Mike, can be a little more viscous than water if it is ethane-rich.
Maybe even double the viscosity of water if Cordier's model composition
with several per cent propane and butane dissolved in is anywhere close.
see http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~rlorenz/viscositywaves.pdf

Thanks seconded Centsworth!
I had no idea the destination lake on Titan was bigger than Lake Superior on Earth. What a mission.

Time seems like quite a timely proposal. Congratulations!

Wow! The estimated viscosity of ethane compared to methane is completely counterintuitive. I wonder what the reason is? I'da thought that it was only intermolecular interactions via dispersion forces, and that one saturated C-H electron cloud would look like another. Off the top of my head, at those low temperatures I'd also guess that the two CH3 groups would be gauche to each other (hindered rotation), negating any hyperconjugation and thus increased polarization of the molecular orbitals.

(Note that N2 is not viscous - likely due to intermolecular lone pair repulsion).

Is it a size thing?

Get out.

TiME should be an aerobot rather than a boat. After all, TiME flies!


I could go on, I've got a million of these...

I see that the UMSF bad pun tradition is alive & well.

I suggest that if the secondary target is selected, TiME should be renamed "Nautical Exploration With Sonar/Wideband Evaluation [of] Exochemistry [at] Kraken".

I'll get my hat.

Just what I was going to say Mike......

Very exciting news about the proposal.

Re: pictures of the lake surface, artists renderings I've seen show what looks like a light source - enough perhaps with the available power to be able to get some some good images within a metre or two of the craft?

It looks (from scheme), that two imaging instruments are planned. One is down-looking (descent imager?) and on side-looking (panoramic camera?).
I would like to ask two questions. It's possible use descent camera to look at the bottom of the mare (if it's not too deep, liquid is transparent and probe has source of light) and I don't fully understand why is Ligeia mare primary target. It looks, that Kraken mare (secondary target) is better suited from communication point of view and is more suitable for possible mission extension.

Unfortunately it does look a bit iffy for getting good descent images of the shoreline. Just for fun, I superimposed pre-Huygens landing descent image footprint projections over a map of Ligeia Mare. Haze would probably prevent good imaging outside of the green octagon, which barely touches the shore. The really good wide Huygens panorama was within the magenta circle, and the great landing area panorama would just cover the black X. I'm hoping for some improvements over the Huygens "camera". Maybe a telescopic lens?

The probe being blown to shore during the course of the mission doesn't look too good either. The probe could easily land 100 km from the shore and even a "perfect" wind, blowing constantly in one direction toward the nearest shoreline would need to blow the probe over a kilometer a day for three months. Not a likely scenario.

Click to view attachment

You don't want a telescopic lens. It's not the angular resolution that's the problem, it's the haze extinction. You want a really good S/N ratio to combat the reduction in contrast when looking through an optically thick layer of haze. Huygens DISR was already pretty good in this respect. IIRC it returned 10 bit data to Earth, square-root-encoded from 14 bit A/D output. 10 bit data is still pretty much standard for spacecraft today.

Where there could be some improvement over Huygens is in selecting a narrow spectral window like ISS CB3 instead of a broader range Huygens used. This does come at a price though - much longer exposures needed and if your spacecraft is rocking really hard on the way down this virtually guarantees image smear.

I'd love to enter the discussion, but the Step 1 selection just means this is now a much more
cut-throat competition, and many details of the mission will have to remain proprietary for now.
There are very smart people on the team (a look at author lists of abstracts will clue you in)
who spent a lot of time thinking how best to do imaging, and there are very good reasons
for choosing Ligeia, etc.

It is my intent to make as many details public as is feasible, to engage the scientific community
and the public at large to the greatest extent, but the competitive process will restrict that
for the time being.

Hopefully one day I'll get to write the full story in a book - the followup to Titan Unveiled. I'm thinking
a good title might be 'A Brief History of TiME'......

Thanks for the laugh!

Bravo!

I certainly hope to see this one fly.

--Greg :-)

I was thinking about a telescopic lens to image the shoreline from a hundred plus km away at an altitude of under thirty km where, hopefully, haze will not be much of an issue. It may be too much risk to design a lens around the assumption of clear skies under thirty km though.

What a problem! Designing a descent imaging system while taking volatile weather into account!

I was under the impression the haze doesn't "end" below a certain altitude, it just becomes transparent enough. It's not that thick per km to start with (not what you'd think of fog on Earth). Loking a hundred km into the distance horizontally likely wouldn't be any different than looking vertically. A narrow-angle imager would also be much more sensitive to atmospheric buffeting.

And hopefully we'll all get to read it!
Very best of luck to you and your esteemed colleagues, rlorenz, on this amazing adventure !

Ralph, although I'm sure it's proprietary right now, I'll be fascinated to see the EDL methodology.

All in due...... well, you know.

<groan>...walked right into that one!

With luck, there should be a naming contest or we'll have a full decade of puns to look forward too.
Or we can just avoid making clever acronyms (like MESSENGER) in the first place and give the mission a normal name from the start, like New Horizons.

Alan Stern put it best way back when:

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/overview/piPerspec...ctive_05_2005_1

Not a bad point, Explorer, and I think that NH was very well-named indeed.

Too bad that so many of the maritime pioneer names have been taken; TiME, of all missions to date, deserves a nautical name. Frankly, though, I don't care if we call it the "Benthic Explorer: Nautical Depth, Environmental Reconnaissance" or "Nautical Probe: Revealing Ethane Vastness" ; I just want it to fly, very, very badly.

(Okay...so maybe I would slightly favor the latter acronym...)

We've honored past astronomers with Galileo, Cassini and Huygens. So why not honor a mariner like Captain James Cook, Roald Amundsen, or James Clark Ross. It seems that an explorer of the Arctic or Antarctic oceans would be a good choice for a robotic explorer of the frigid lakes of Titan. Or maybe even a ship's name? Perhaps the Fram, or even the Titan Challenger, to honor that historic 19th century oceanographic voyage.

I vote for Shackleton's ship 'Endurance' :

Despite the honor of Shackleton & men and their long struggle, not sure if that is the best name for a probe with a (sadly) limited mission life

How about "Armada" from "The Spanish Armada" , they did not last very long.....

I like "Admunsen"; seems like a very apropos honor for him, and for the Titanian environment. Alternatively, if naming TiME after a polar sailing ship that lasted a limited time or made a limited voyage is the selected paradigm, what was/were the names of his ship(s)?