Significant Event Report for Week Ending 8/14/1998

Cassini Significant Event Report

For Week Ending 08/14/98

Spacecraft Status:

The most recent Spacecraft status is from the DSN tracking pass on Wednesday, 08/12, over Goldstone.
The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is executing the C9 sequence nominally. The speed of the spacecraft can be viewed on the "Where is Cassini Now?" web page (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operations/present-position.cfm)

Spacecraft Activity Summary:

Beginning on Friday, 8/7, the Cassini Program has been able to reduce the number of DSN stations needed to
collect Navigation ranging data, at least through the end of the calendar year. For the last several months, dual
34 meter/70 meter DSN tracks have been needed for both spacecraft command/telemetry passes and
ranging-only passes. Ground controllers have found that due to better than predicted ranging performance and
an improving telecom link due to recently improved trajectory geometry, the 70 meter stations can be released
from the ranging-only tracks. This release will free time on these unique and valuable DSN stations for use by
other projects.

On Wednesday, 08/12, an activity was performed to store RTE 158-enable and ATC6 parameter-update
software on the Solid State Recorder (SSR). This software had been uplinked to the spacecraft several
weeks ago, but only to active CDS memory. The storage of this software on the SSR makes the RTE 158
and ATC6 capabilities easily recoverable in the unlikely event of an anomaly with one of the CDS computers.

Also on Wednesday, the SSR record and playback pointers were reset. This housekeeping activity, done
approximately weekly, maximizes the amount of time that recorded engineering data is available for playback
to the ground should an anomaly occur on the spacecraft.

Upcoming events:

Activities scheduled for the week of 08/14 - 08/20 include: SSR FSW Partition Maintenance, and SSR
Pointer Reset (8/19).

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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