Cassini Significant Events 08/15/07 – 08/21/07

Cassini Significant Events 08/15/07 - 08/21/07

August 23, 2007

(Source: Cassini Project)

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired on Tuesday, Aug. 21, from the Goldstone tracking complex. 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" web page located at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present-position.cfm .


Wednesday, Aug. 15 (DOY 227):

Cassini entered solar conjunction today when the Sun-Earth-Probe (SEP) angle reached 5 degrees. This angle reached a minimum of 1.24 degrees on Aug. 21, and will reach 5 degrees again when conjunction completes on Aug. 27.

Thursday, Aug. 16 (DOY 228.):

The Command Loss Timer (CLT) value was set from the nominal 85 hours to 10 days in the background sequence on Aug. 16, 2007, and was reinforced with a real-time command Aug. 17 in preparation for conjunction and the period of time when Cassini is out of communication with Earth. The CLT decrements down during conjunction, and will be set to the nominal value of 85 hours on Aug. 24, when the SEP angle has increased to about 3 degrees.

An Instrument Operations working group (IOWG) meeting was held to discuss the extended mission processes and schedule. With just one exception, all instrument teams concurred that they could support the schedule.

Friday, Aug. 17 (DOY 222):

The S35 science operations plan update (SOPU) completed today.

Saturday, Aug. 18 (DOY 230):

A command moratorium centered around solar conjunction has started today. A command moratorium is put into place when the SEP angle is 2 degrees or less.

A series of commands, which are exempted from the command moratorium because their receipt on-board is not required, is being sent up daily (Aug. 18 - Aug. 25, 2007) as part of the Radio Frequency Subsystem (RFS) characterization of the solar corona. The RFS team will assess which commands "got through" the interference from the sun.

Monday, Aug. 20 (DOY 232):

Cassini outreach and visualization activities and products were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress 2007 in Potsdam, Germany, Aug. 20 - 24.

The S36 science operations plan update kicked off today. This process completes on September 28, 2007. The preliminary port is scheduled for September 4, 2007.

AACS presented six papers at the 2007 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference Aug. 20-23, 2007, in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

CDS V10 flight software preliminary end-to-end Integrated Test Laboratory (ITL) testing began today and will run through Aug. 24. The final end-to-end ITL testing will begin September 4 and run through September 11, 2007. Uplink is set for the end of September.

Tuesday, Aug. 21 (DOY 233)

In the last week, 1637 Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) images were acquired, including nine for Optical Navigation. Since approach science began in January, 2004, 128568 ISS images have been acquired.