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Significant Event Report for Week Ending 11/15/2002

Cassini Significant Event Report

For Week Ending 11/15/02

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, November 13. 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.

On board activities this week included Radio and Plasma Wave Science High Frequency Receiver calibrations
and a high rate cyclic, the second of two tests at the new ESA tracking station in New Norcia, Australia, and a
checkout of the new RADAR Version 3.0 Flight Software (FSW). The software loaded properly, and the
Instrument Expanded Block (IEB) executed as expected. Analysis of data returned is on-going but at this time
the FSW appears to be operating as designed with no anomalies detected.


The development of the Science Operations Plan for tour sequences S11/S12 completed this week. A
wrap-up meeting was held to present the state of the sequences as archived.


Two meetings were held over the past two weeks with leads from the Target Working Teams (TWT), Orbiter
Science Teams (OST), and the Science Planning Engineers. Discussion was focused on ways to reduce the
complexity of the integration of the Science Operations Plan in an effort to simplify the implementation process.
TWT/OST integration guidelines will be forthcoming shortly.


S14 has been chosen as the tour sequence to be used for Verification & Validation (V&V) activities to be
performed beginning in April of next year. This sequence was chosen as it contains many challenging Tour
activities, including a Synthetic Aperture RADAR observation during a low-altitude Titan flyby. V&V status
was presented at this week's Cassini Design Team meeting.


Gravitational Wave Experiment #2 will begin December 6 and continue until mid January 2003. In order to be
able to provide continuous ACE coverage for this experiment the Mission Support and Services offices put out
a call internal to Cassini for anyone who would like to dust off their ACE skills and assist in staffing this
important event. Members of MSSO and the Spacecraft Operations Office have responded and will be
undergoing refresher training over the next month.


The Outreach Team traveled to Oakland, California to meet with members of the Cassini K-4 reading and
language program. The meeting focused on content review, formulating a schedule for testing and completion of
the materials, and general administrative details. Project FIRST hosted the meeting at the UC Berkeley campus.



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 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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