Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: What's Your Source?

re: What's Your Source?

AFAIK, encounters for the rest of the tour after the Huygens entry (starting with Titan 3 on Feb 15) were not affected by the change from November to January and the adding of the earlier orbits.

That's true. The revised orbital tour stemming from the Huygens communications relay anomaly recovery effort picks up the baseline T18-5 tour at T3. However, if the probe mission is delayed beyond Tc, then things get a little trickier. The two contingency options I've seen allow for probe delivery on subsequent Titan flybys but disrupt the tour. In fact, under one contingency option an extra Titan flyby is inserted into the sequence to deploy the probe but, in addition to extra propellant expenditure, two of the three extremely high priority Enceladus targeted flybys would be lost. Needless to say, the orbiter science teams would very unhappy if this comes to pass. And one colleague told me, perhaps in jest, that if Huygens cannot be delivered at Tc, he would advocate ditching the probe into orbit.

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