SES100_Fall2023_Project1_Part3_ScienceGroup
pdf
keyboard_arrow_up
School
Arizona State University *
*We aren’t endorsed by this school
Course
100
Subject
Astronomy
Date
Dec 6, 2023
Type
Pages
5
Uploaded by EarlBadger3914
SES 100: Introduction to Exploration
Project 1: Group Science Planning (50 pts.)
Group Number: 6
Names of Group Members:
Ryan Hofmann, AJ Azevedo, Dylan Prince,
Christian Hoffman
Instructions
Please answer all the questions posed in this assignment and upload your solutions as
a pdf. Feel free to scan any handwritten calculations and notes but include everything in
one pdf. All group members should work together on the assignment—everyone should
submit an identical copy of the group’s solutions. Remember to consult the “General
Guidelines” document for basic information about the missions and camera options.
Please show your work for any calculations. When you perform calculations, please
remember to keep track of and report your units—and respect significant figures.
Warning!
If you copy/paste this assignment into another application (such as Google Docs), then
beware that the Greek letter mu (μ) may be converted into the roman letter m. Please
double-check that your units are correct in the pdf that you submit. Otherwise, your
reported answers will be incorrect by a factor of 1000, which is bad.
Part 1: Science Goals and Objectives (15 pts.)
What world will your group’s mission target, Venus or Titan?
Venus
What priority question(s) from the decadal survey will your mission address?
Our mission will address the formation of venus’ dense atmosphere and the possibility
of life being contained within the more temperate high altitude upper troposphere/ lower
stratosphere
Briefly, what is a science question (more specific than found in the decadal survey) that
your mission could help answer by imaging your selected feature?
Why were greenhouse gasses unable to escape the atmosphere of venus if its
magnetic field is so weak, and why did its magnetic field form so weakly
Roughly how large is your feature of interest? What approximate spatial resolution do
you think you need to resolve interesting aspects of the feature?
Our feature of interest is in the polar vortex on the southern pole of venus. The eye of
this vortex is about 2200 km x 1400 km. The spatial resolution would need to be better
than 150m per pixel
Do you want color images (RGB) of your feature, or will monochrome images suffice?
We want color images of our feature as it will make it easier to make out what
everything is.
Part 2: Make Your Choices (32 pts.)
Find an image of your chosen feature with a scale bar.
First, draw an arrow across the image to represent the center of your imaging traverse.
For Venus, the line must run from east to west because of the prevailing winds. For
Titan, the line can be oriented in any direction.
Next, choose what lens you will use for SpaceCam (from the three options). Explain
your choice. (The tradeoff is that a larger lens will have a better spatial resolution but
worse spatial coverage. How you balance these factors depends on the size of the
feature and the scale[s] of the detail[s] that you want to resolve.)
For our mission, we would need to use the wide angle lens to achieve the maximum
possible spatial resolution. The reason we choose the wide angle lens is to maximize
the spatial coverage, as the distances covered by the vortex are extremely large, so we
need to cover as much area in our pictures as possible.
Then, decide what type of filter you will use (no filter, Bayer filter, or strip filters?). Again,
this choice involves various tradeoffs. Explain the rationale you used to make your
choice.
Using no filter we can achieve a 58.68km x 39.12km spatial coverage. This is the most
advantageous for us since we need the largest spatial coverage we can get.
Finally, add rectangles to your figure to represent the spatial coverage of each image
during the traverse. How many total images are required to complete the traverse?
Approximately 48 pictures are needed to cross the length of the polar vortex.
Your preview ends here
Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help
Part 3: Contributions (3 pts.)
Please briefly explain what each group member contributed to this assignment.
Ryan Hofmann: worked on the science goals and objectives questions
AJ Azevedo: Graphics for part 2, and worked on part 2 questions
Colton Skinner: worked on part 1
Dylan Prince: worked on part 1
Christian Hoffman: worked on part 2 questions
Example:
Let’s say that I designed an imaging traverse of Mead Basin on Venus.
Imagine that I chose a lens to provide a spatial coverage of 30 km by 20 km per image
and a spatial resolution of 5 m per pixel (not necessarily one of the three options that I
made up for SpaceCam). I chose to install three strip filters on the detector (oriented
with the long axis perpendicular to the direction of motion of the imager) so that I could
collect color images without compromising my spatial resolution (albeit at the cost of
needing to take three times as many images to cover the same area in all three filters).
The traverse has a total length of ~380 km, meaning that 380 km / 20 km * 3 = 57
images are required to be collected in total.
(Note that you also need to provide a
scientific
justification for your choices and
requirements.)
In the figure below, I annotated a greyscale radar image of Mead Basin from the NASA
Magellan Mission. The dotted, yellow arrow shows the ground track of the aerobot over
the center of the basin (moving from east to west). Each red rectangle shows the spatial
coverage of a single image.