NASA Cassini-Huygens Mission Status Report 12 July 2004

The Cassini spacecraft emerged from behind the Sun today after being
in solar conjunction since July 5. The most recent spacecraft
telemetry was acquired from the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone
tracking station near Barstow, Calif., today. The spacecraft is in
excellent health and operating normally.

Just before Cassini began its transit behind the Sun, it snapped
pictures of Saturn’s moons
Mimas, Tethys, Rhea and Iapetus. These and other new pictures from
Saturn can be found as raw images at
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/index.cfm .

Solar conjunction occurs when the Sun is between the spacecraft and
Earth. During this time, the spacecraft conducts only limited science
observations. Command and downlink capability is reduced to a
minimum, with an uplink command file consisting of 10 commands sent
every five minutes, 10 to 20 times a day. The purpose of this test is
to assess the spaceraft’s ability to receive commands from Earth when
the signal path goes so close to the Sun.

The Cassini-Huygens mission 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, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Office of
Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL designed, developed and assembled
the Cassini orbiter.

For the latest images and more information about the Cassini-Huygens
mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .