Cassini Significant Events for 11/07/02 – 11/13/02

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone
tracking station on Wednesday, November 13. The Cassini spacecraft is
in an excellent state of health and is 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 .

On board activities this week included Radio and Plasma Wave Science
High Frequency Receiver calibrations and a high rate cyclic, the second
of two tests at the new ESA tracking station in New Norcia, Australia,
and a checkout of the new RADAR Version 3.0 Flight Software (FSW). The
software loaded properly, and the Instrument Expanded Block (IEB)
executed as expected. Analysis of data returned is on-going but at this
time the FSW appears to be operating as designed with no anomalies
detected.

The development of the Science Operations Plan for tour sequences
S11/S12 completed this week. A wrap-up meeting was held to present the
state of the sequences as archived.

Two meetings were held over the past two weeks with leads from the
Target Working Teams (TWT), Orbiter Science Teams (OST), and the Science
Planning Engineers. Discussion was focused on ways to reduce the
complexity of the integration of the Science Operations Plan in an
effort to simplify the implementation process. TWT/OST integration
guidelines will be forthcoming shortly.

S14 has been chosen as the tour sequence to be used for Verification &
Validation (V&V) activities to be performed beginning in April of next
year. This sequence was chosen as it contains many challenging Tour
activities, including a Synthetic Aperture RADAR observation during a
low-altitude Titan flyby. V&V status was presented at this week’s
Cassini Design Team meeting.

Gravitational Wave Experiment #2 will begin December 6 and continue
until mid January 2003. In order to be able to provide continuous ACE
coverage for this experiment the Mission Support and Services offices
put out a call internal to Cassini for anyone who would like to dust off
their ACE skills and assist in staffing this important event. Members
of MSSO and the Spacecraft Operations Office have responded and will be
undergoing refresher training over the next month.

The Outreach Team traveled to Oakland, California to meet with members
of the Cassini K-4 reading and language program. The meeting focused on
content review, formulating a schedule for testing and completion of the
materials, and general administrative details. Project FIRST hosted the
meeting at the UC Berkeley campus.

Cassini is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and
the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the
Cassini mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.