Cassini Significant Events 08/10/11 – 08/16/11

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired on August 16 from the Deep Space Network tracking complex at Goldstone, California. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating normally. Information on the present position and speed of the Cassini spacecraft may be found on the "Present Position" page at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/presentposition/.

Wednesday, Aug. 10 (DOY 222)

This week in science was dominated by observations of Saturn by the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS), the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS), and the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) while the spacecraft was near apoapsis in its orbit. The observations were designed to track wind speeds and study atmospheric composition. The Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) also performed an observation to study the upper atmosphere of Saturn, and ISS and VIMS observed Titan twice (1.5 hr each) as part of the cloud monitoring campaign. ISS made a 14-hour observation of the small irregular outer moon Tarqeq to study its light curve.

Thursday, Aug. 11 (DOY 223)

In the last week, 771 ISS images and 43 VIMS cubes were generated and distributed.

Monday, Aug. 15 (DOY 227)

The Navigation Team delivered an orbit determination (OD) solution today in support of an unplanned Saturn/Hyperion live Inertial Vector Propagator (IVP) update, tentatively scheduled for uplink on DOY 230. The need for this live IVP update was not predicted at the start of S69, but pointing offsets were discovered resulting from small execution errors at OTM-287 that propagated as trajectory dispersions over the nearly two months since OTM-287.

Tuesday, Aug. 16 (DOY 228)

Commands were uplinked to the spacecraft today over Goldstone’s DSS-15 station in support of S69 for the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) parameter update due to execute on DOY 234. This parameter adjustment is done to avoid saturating one of the instrument's detectors.

The Spacecraft Operations (SCO) team delivered the Cassini Operations Reference Encyclopedia (CORE) V6.1 software today. This is the command and flight rules dictionary. Analysts are given the opportunity to view command and flight rule information associated with a particular sequence through formatted Oracle queries. CORE was updated to remove unused telemetry channel hyperlinks in displayed commands and printed reports.

A kickoff meeting was held today for the S72 Sequence Implementation Process. Port 1 for the first set of input files from the teams occurs August 31.