Significant Event Report for Week Ending 10/12/2001

Cassini Significant Event Report

For Week Ending 10/12/01

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone
tracking station on Sunday, October 7. The Cassini spacecraft is in an
excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the
spacecraft's position and speed can be viewed on the
"Present Position"
web page.

Recent instrument activities include the third in a series of Cosmic Dust
Analyzer noise evaluations, the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer
being placed in sleep mode, two Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) High
Frequency Receiver calibrations and an RPWS Periodic Instrument
Maintenance activity. Engineering activities taking place onboard the
spacecraft this week include an autonomous Command & Data Subsystem Solid
State Recorder Memory Load Partition Repair and further Attitude Control
Subsystem (ACS) deadband testing, which will provide more data for a trade
study on hydrazine consumption for two different Reaction Control
Subsystem deadband settings.

Sequence development for C29 is proceeding on schedule. The Sequence Team
Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation phase continued with two
meetings held last week to review simulation coordination and preliminary
sequence change requests. The Huygens Probe team has submitted inputs for
the Probe Relay test in C29 and the corresponding minisequences are now in
development.

The Project Science Group (PSG) met this week at JPL. Principal items of
discussion were Discipline working group activities, Target Working Team
status and progress, and Saturn dust models. In addition to the PSG
science planning work, Cassini JPL personnel are using this opportunity to
meet with the PSG science teams to work out various scheduling and support
issues.

The Instrument Operations team coordinated with several other groups to
provide training to Program personnel this week, especially for
out-of-town science team members who were present for the PSG meetings
anyway. Tutorials on the Planetary Data System and Events Kernel were
held, and the Spacecraft Operations Office (SCO) supported an overview of
the ACS. The Uplink Operations (ULO) office also completed the week-long
workshop for users of the newest versions of the Pointing Design Tool and
Science Opportunity Analyzer software.

ULO hosted a third meeting on Mission Sequence Subsystem (MSS) D8
priorities, with good support from SCO, Mission Support & Services Office
(MSSO), and Science Planning. Significant progress has been made in
defining the user needs and associated work to meet those needs.

System Engineering and MSSO examined how to best distribute
science-planning tools to the science team Co-Investigators. Various
options have been discussed with some of the science teams, and the
comments from that discussion are being integrated into an overall plan.

Additional information about Cassini-Huygens is online at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Cassini will begin orbiting Saturn on July 1, 2004, and release its piggybacked Huygens probe about six months later for descent through the thick atmosphere of the moon Titan. Cassini-Huygens is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

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