Significant Event Report for Week Ending 4/14/2000

Cassini Significant Event Report

For Week Ending 04/14/00

The most recent spacecraft telemetry data was acquired from the
Canberra tracking station on Tuesday, 11 April. The Cassini spacecraft is
in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Spacecraft
maintenance activities continue to be performed by real time commands
prior to C19 uplink. The speed of the spacecraft can be viewed on the "Where is Cassini Now?" web page.

The Final Sequence Integration and Validation meeting was held for C19.
The sequence was approved and will be uplinked to the spacecraft on
Thursday, 13 April. The Subsequence Generation Phase for C20 concluded
with the submission of all detailed subsequences by the instrument teams
and the Spacecraft Office. The Sequence Integration and Validation Phase
has begun, testing in the Integrated Test Lab is scheduled for next week.

A series of technical interchange meetings with Huygens Probe personnel
have been held this week. Items of discussion included a preliminary
assessment of the probe relay end-to-end test conducted last February, a
review of the mission interfaces between Cassini and Huygens, and a
detailed review of probe relay requirements.

Cassini Outreach was part of a joint presentation at the National Science
Teachers Association annual convention in Orlando last Saturday. Among
featured topics were the joint investigations of Jupiter to be carried out
by Cassini and Galileo at the end of this year. Outreach presented a
description of the event and related educational activities soon to be
available on the web.

Flight software updates for the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) and the
Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instruments were approved and
delivered to the Project Software Library this week. This is the last of
seven instrument flight software updates needed for Instrument Checkout #2
to be conducted this summer.

The Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) team began discussions with Deep Space
Network personnel on the test schedule for the DSS-25 Upgrade Task.
Testing will be conducted in the spring of 2001. RSS and DSN technical
leads presented a briefing to the Cassini management and key staff on the
content and status of this task.

The preliminary version of the system-level Verification and Validation
Plan for Tour was distributed to the Cassini Flight Team for review.

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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