Cassini Update - January 13, 2006

Cassini Significant Events
for 01/05/06 - 01/11/06

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired Wednesday, January
11,
from the Goldstone tracking stations. 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/operation...t-position.cfm .

Thursday, January 5 (DOY 005):

Members of the Cassini Spacecraft Operations Office received a NASA
Space
Act Inventions and Contributions Board Major Award for their
development of
the Reaction Wheel Assembly Bias Optimization Tool, or RBOT.

Cassini passed by apoapsis today and began its 20th orbit around
Saturn.

Friday, January 6 (DOY 006):

The flight software normalization activity begun last week for the
Composite
Infrared Spectrometer and Cassini Plasma Spectrometer was completed
today.
The old version of the software for each instrument has been removed,
and
both now have matching copies of the new versions on all partitions of
each
SSR.

Saturday, January 7 (DOY 007):

Due to interference caused by rain in Spain - at the Madrid DSN complex
-
commands sent to Cassini on Friday for a memory readout of the CDS Non
Interfering Error Log were sent again today.

Cassini Outreach held its first Saturn Observation Campaign viewing
event of
the year today in Monrovia, CA. Over 100 members of the community
stopped
by for a look at the moon, Mars, and later, Saturn. Helping out were
two
young sisters who brought their brand new Christmas telescope. After
learning how to set the telescope up themselves, they offered views of
the
moon and planets to members of the public. Contact members of the
Saturn
Observation Campaign for information about Saturn viewing in your area.
http://soc.jpl.nasa.gov/members.cfm

Monday, January 9 (DOY 009):

Orbit Trim Maneuver (OTM)#49 scheduled for Wednesday, January 11, has
been
cancelled based on tracking data acquired over the weekend. The
current
estimate for this maneuver is 0.7 mm/sec, yielding a correction at
encounter
of about 220 meters. Since this magnitude is below the minimum
reaction
control subsystem maneuver magnitude, and there is no reasonable
expectation
of a large orbit estimate change, the maneuver can be cancelled. (Note
that
0.7 mm/sec, when expressed in more familiar units, is only 2.5 m/hr.)

Tuesday, January 10 (DOY 010):

A CDS flight software patch (FSW) uplink for SSR Auto Repair code begun
Sunday night was successfully completed today. This patch fixes code
that
was not working in the library region. The interim solution had been
to
disable the auto repair and perform weekly memory read outs to keep
track of
and selectively clear double bit errors. This FSW patch is currently
working on both strings.

Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) and Multi Mission Image Processing
Laboratory personnel supported processing of a critical Optical
Navigation
image (OpNav) during prime shift today. As is the case for all critical
OpNavs, preparations were in place for manually expediting processing
in the
event of a system or network failure.

At the S17 DOY 06-017 Live Inertial Vector Propagator update kickoff
meeting, it was determined that an extremely low change in pointing
would
occur with the update. All involved parties agreed that the update
could be
cancelled.

Wednesday, January 11 (DOY 011):

This week from January 5 through 11 the entire suite of Magnetospheric
and
Plasma Science (MAPS) instruments simultaneously performed low-rate
outer
magnetospheric surveys to observe the variability of the dawn-side
magnetospheric boundaries at a variety of radial distances.

The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) tracked many small moons for orbit
determination and performed a narrow-angle camera dark current
calibration.
The Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument performed some
instrument stellar calibrations using the star Beta Orion.

Wrap up:

Check out the Cassini web site at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov for the
latest
press releases and images.

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 Science Mission Directorate,
Washington,
D.C. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter.