Cassini Weekly Significant Events for 02/24/00 – 03/01/00

The most recent spacecraft telemetry data was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Monday, 02/28. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally.  The speed of the spacecraft can be viewed on the "Where is Cassini Now?" web page ( "http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/today/" )
 
Development leads met for the first of two meetings to review and coordinate in-progress plans for development in support of science planning for Tour.  Planned capabilities and user needs, drivers, schedule, dependencies, and risk areas were covered. Much of the discussion and follow-up actions focused on discrepancies between science planning expectations and planned capability deliveries for tools (chiefly Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) and Cassini Information Management System (CIMS)), identification of optical navigation windows, need for an instrument flight rule scrub, and need for science prioritization of requirements on SOA.
 
Deliveries were made of the MSS D7.0 ground software set to be installed on the SUN platforms, including the Pointing Design Tool (PDT) that the science teams need to develop science sequence events for Sequence C22. Preliminary deliveries were also made of the Kinematic Predictor Tool (KPT),  Inertial Vector Propagation (IVP), the Predict Generation Tool (PGT), and the UVIS and RPWS instrument flight software.
 
Cassini Outreach met with a Space Explorers Inc. representative last Thursday to plan the teacher training institute for the Solar System Educators.  Cassini classroom lessons are well-represented in the overall schedule of the institute.  The institute will be held at JPL at the end of March for about 25 Educators.
 
It was decided that the first wave of scientific papers resulting from the flyby of Venus and the Earth will be published as a special collection in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) published by the American Geophysical Union.  Dennis Matson, Cassini Project Scientist, accepted the publication invitation put forward by Michel Blanc, JGR European Editor, who now will be responsible for overseeing the process of getting the Cassini results into print.
 
All Remote Terminal Interface Unit (RTIU) hardware has been delivered and development has started.  This will lead to a standard interface for the Remote Sites.  Each instrument except Radio Science uses an RTIU in their instrument test bed.
RTIUs are used in:
  – sequence and subsequence generation and validation
  – Instrument Expanded Block generation and validation
  – instrument anomaly resolution
  – instrument flight software development and testing
They will be used through end of mission.
 
An Orbiter Science Operations Working Team (OSOWT) telecon was held on Friday, February 25, 2000 to continue to work on the science integration of the Jupiter Subphase.  This meeting focused on the period from -25d to +15d from Jupiter closest approach.
 
The AACS FSW upload command files and procedures were successfully tested in the ITL in system mode. Simulation data was broadcast through the operations net, as this exercise also served as a final team rehearsal for the uplink actvities beginning March 6.
 
Cassini Outreach
Cassini Mission to Saturn and Titan
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
National Aeronautics and Space Administration