Quote:
Originally Posted by Warren Platts
They'll be lucky to get a good estimate of the J2 gravitational moment ...
|
Well,
the plan (384 kb pdf) has always been to do just that:
Quote:
|
With four ideal flybys, including two flybys at Titan’s periapsis and two flybys at Titan’s apoapsis, numerical calculations indicate that we can determine J2 and C22 with accuracies of a few x10-9 and that we can determine k2 with an accuracy of a few x10-3.
|
(This is the very last paragraph of the linked 1997
Icarus article from JPL.)
And as of last month, with three flybys under their belts, the same team were
predicting a >90% chance of distinguishing between "ocean" and "no ocean" using measured quadrupole moments to dig out a precise Love number.
Grant Hutchison