Cassini Significant Events for 09/12/02 - 09/18/02

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, September 18. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" web page.

Instrument activities this week included Radio and Plasma Wave Science High Frequency Receiver calibrations, execution and playback of Probe Checkout #10, and a Cassini Plasma Spectrometer Gain States Change. Additional on-board activities included clearing of the CDS error logs and ACS high water marks, and an autonomous Solid State Recorder Memory Load Partition repair activity.

Sequence development for C34 concluded this week with release of the final products, and a Final Sequence Integration & Validation meeting. The sequence was then successfully uplinked over Wednesday's pass and will begin execution on Saturday.

Last week the PC version of the Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) program was delivered by the Mission Sequence Subsystem (MSS) for installation on the download website. The installation is now complete and authorized users may download SOA for use on their local PCs. The software is subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulation restrictions and pre-approval for access to the download site is required.

Hosted by System Engineering, several meetings have been held over the past week to discuss Cassini Information Management System (CIMS) requirements with the distributed science teams. This effort has culminated in a 3-hour workshop. A consensus has been obtained on the direction development should take. Focus is on the CIMS 2.4 delivery some time in November 2002. The Uplink Operations MSS team is now moving forward to develop detailed requirements and design for the Science Planning Attitude Spread Sheet and Spacecraft Activity Sequence File interface.

A Software Requirements Certification Review meeting was held for RADAR flight software. The software will now go through uplink checkout and will be radiated to the spacecraft as part of the activities during C34.

Mission Assurance has scheduled a meeting to discuss Risk Management with the Cassini Principal Investigators (PIs) during the October Project Science Group meeting. A NASA Independent Review Team has recommended PI involvement in the Risk Management process and this is the first step towards achieving participation. Advanced copies of the slides were distributed this week for review.

Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

Cassini Outreach
Cassini Mission to Saturn and Titan
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
National Aeronautics and Space Administration