Significant Event Report for Week Ending 10/5/2001

Cassini Significant Event Report

For Week Ending 10/05/01

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone
tracking station on Saturday, September 29. 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 a Radio and Plasma Wave Science High
Frequency Receiver calibration, and the second in a series of Cosmic Dust
Analyzer noise evaluations. Engineering activities taking place onboard
the spacecraft this week included further Attitude Control Subsystem
deadband testing, which will provide more data for a trade study on
hydrazine consumption for two different Reaction Control Subsystem
deadband settings.

The Cassini program hosted the kickoff meeting of the Huygens Mission
Recovery Team on September 27-28. This meeting begins the second phase of
the recovery effort wherein the results of the Huygens Recovery Task Force
are implemented along with the accompanying detailed analyses. The team
allocated the remaining work to the supporting technical sites and
developed a schedule for the effort. One outcome of the work plan is the
long-term collocation of several Huygens personnel at JPL. This will
considerably increase the efficiency of the iterative work between the two
programs. The next meeting will be held at JPL in December.

The Project Briefing for the C30 Science Planning Team sequence product
was held this week, and the sequence was approved for implementation. Due
to the high workload of supporting the various tour planning activities,
this cruise sequence was constrained not to have any observations which
require turning the spacecraft, greatly simplifying implementation.

The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) teams analysis of the
C28 timing test data shows that the new VIMS Flight Software Version 4.2
is performing as expected.

A workshop was held this week to train Cassini Project members in the use
of the Pointing Design Tool (PDT) and Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA)
software sets. Forty individuals from six different countries were on
hand for this five-day workshop, including personnel from ten Instrument
Teams, the Huygens Probe, Science Planning and the Spacecraft Operations
Office (SCO). Developed by JPL Deep Space Mission Services in conjunction
with Cassini Uplink Operations (ULO), SOA allows investigators to perform
high-level science planning and identify key opportunities to perform
science observations. PDT is being developed by ULO and is used to design
detailed observations. When used in operations, this software outputs
files that are incorporated into the sequences to be flown aboard the
spacecraft.

The SCO delivered Version 7.0 of the Cassini Spacecraft Analysis System.
This version contains significant upgrades to the Kinematic Prediction
Tool/ Inertial Vector Propagator software, which will support the Science
Operations Plan (SOP) development.

Mission Sequence Subsystem (MSS) has held several meetings to define the
MSS D8 delivery scope. Participation by Science, Science Planning, System
Engineering and Coordination, and SCO personnel have helped significantly
in refining the target capabilities the MSS implement to support the SOP
effort.

Mission Assurance has reviewed the JPL Design Principles with respect to
Cassini Mission Operations and Data Analysis (MO&DA). A matrix has been
produced that documents which principles apply to MO&DA and of these
whether Cassini is compliant or non-compliant. The matrix has been
reviewed by the SCO and will be released to the Cassini Electronic Library
shortly.

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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