In article ,
Christopher M. Jones wrote:
Limited bandwidth and limited budget I'll buy, but not limited light.
Modern imaging technology is just too good to give that any weight.
Keep in mind that the '70s vintage Voyager spacecraft did a fair job
out at Neptune...

Bear in mind that the only probe yet to enter Jupiter's atmosphere was
built only a few years after the Voyagers, with quite similar technology.

The two situations also are not quite comparable. Voyager 2 at Neptune
could, and did, use quite long exposures. That option isn't available
when parachuting down through an atmosphere.

...The setup for imagery on
Saturn's moon Titan will be no better than within the Jovian
atmosphere but there at least the probe has the chance to land on the
surface and spool off all its recorded images.

No, the data and images from Huygens will be coming back in real time.
There is no assurance that it will survive the landing, since we know
almost nothing about the nature of the surface. Whether it will remain in
communication is also a little uncertain; in particular, if it lands on a
slope, its antenna may be pointed too far off vertical for Cassini to
continue receiving it. And finally, even if all goes well, it won't be
sending data from the surface for more than a half hour or so (I forget
the exact number), partly because its batteries will be getting very low
but mostly because Cassini will go below its horizon. Huygens is
primarily an atmosphere probe, not a lander, so long surface life was
not a design goal.

The difference in imaging is partly better technology, but mostly just
that the people designing Cassini/Huygens gave imaging a higher priority.
There wasn't any law of nature saying that the Galileo atmosphere probe's
data rate had to be too low for effective imaging; that number emerged from
the design tradeoffs that were made, based partly on the assumption that
the probe didn't *need* a high data rate.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |