NASA Cassini Significant Events for 09/30/03 – 10/01/03

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Madrid
tracking station on Wednesday, October 1. 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 a Radio and Plasma Wave Science
High Frequency Receiver calibration and execution of Trajectory
Correction Maneuver (TCM) 19b.

The maneuver executed normally on October 1, 2003. This TCM was an
in-flight verification of the energy burn cutoff algorithm and the yaw
steering that will be used for Saturn Orbit Insertion. The main engine
burn duration was 21.8 seconds, with a burn magnitude of 2.015
meters/second.

Alcatel Space Systems hosted the fifth Huygens progress meeting in
Cannes. A number of technical issues regarding the Huygens mission were
discussed. The most important outcome of the meeting was the decision to
baseline the pre-heating option. The purpose of pre-heating is to warm
the data system circuitry to further reduce the doppler effect which has
troubled the link performance. Pre-heating is accomplished by powering
the probe four hours prior to entry at Titan. All analyses show that
there are sufficient power reserves and that the mission is completely
robust to this option.

Science Planning hosted a kick-off meeting for Science Operations Plan
implementation of the S05 and S06 tour sequences, and a post process
wrap-up meeting for sequences S03 and S04.

Preliminary and official port 1 deliveries were completed as part of the
cruise C43 science planning team process.

Uplink Operations presented the current plan and timeline for the
Science and Sequence Update Process at this week’s Cassini Design Team
meeting. A number of modifications and lessons learned identified
through the August Verification and Validation activity have been
incorporated.

System Engineering attended a workshop sponsored by Deep Space Mission
Systems and Consolidated Space Operations Contract (CSOC) to redesign
the current DSN allocation process. The implementation will occur
between now and the end of the calendar year. The current CSOC contract
expires in December.

The Outreach Team gave two talks at Polytechnic High School in Long
Beach, California to 250 high school students, and supported the Los
Angeles County Fair.

Science results from the Cassini Radio Science Team were published this
week in Nature. The article “A test of general relativity using radio
links with the Cassini spacecraft” may be accessed at

http://www.nature.com/cgitaf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v425/n6956/full/n
ature01997_fs.html

A more general overview may be viewed at

http://physicsweb.org/article/news/7/9/14

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.