Cassini Significant Events for 08/15/07 - 08/21/07 The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired on Tuesday, August 21, from the Goldstone tracking complex. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are 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. Wednesday, August 15 (DOY 227): Cassini entered solar conjunction today when the Sun-Earth-Probe (SEP) angle reached 5 degrees. This angle reached a minimum of 1.24 degrees on August 21, and will reach 5 degrees again when conjunction completes on August 27. Thursday, August 16 (DOY 228.): The Command Loss Timer (CLT) value was set from the nominal 85 hours to 10 days in the background sequence on August 16, 2007, and was reinforced with a real-time command August 17 in preparation for conjunction and the period of time when Cassini is out of communication with Earth. The CLT decrements down during conjunction, and will be set to the nominal value of 85 hours on August 24, when the SEP angle has increased to about 3 degrees. An Instrument Operations working group (IOWG) meeting was held to discuss the extended mission processes and schedule. With just one exception, all instrument teams concurred that they could support the schedule. Friday, August 17 (DOY 222): The S35 science operations plan update (SOPU) completed today. Saturday, August 18 (DOY 230): A command moratorium centered around solar conjunction has started today. A command moratorium is put into place when the SEP angle is 2 degrees or less. A series of commands, which are exempted from the command moratorium because their receipt on-board is not required, is being sent up daily (August 18 - August 25, 2007) as part of the Radio Frequency Subsystem (RFS) characterization of the solar corona. The RFS team will assess which commands "got through" the interference from the sun. Monday, August 20 (DOY 232): Cassini outreach and visualization activities and products were presented at the European Planetary Science Congress 2007 in Potsdam, Germany, 20 - 24 August. The S36 science operations plan update kicked off today. This process completes on September 28, 2007. The preliminary port is scheduled for September 4, 2007. AACS presented six papers at the 2007 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference August 20-23, 2007, in Hilton Head, South Carolina. CDS V10 flight software preliminary end-to-end Integrated Test Laboratory (ITL) testing began today and will run through August 24. The final end-to-end ITL testing will begin September 4 and run through September 11, 2007. Uplink is set for the end of September. Tuesday, August 21 (DOY 233) In the last week, 1637 Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) images were acquired, including nine for Optical Navigation. Since approach science began in January, 2004, 128568 ISS images have been acquired. 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. --- To unsubscribe from Cassini Spacecraft Updates, send a message to leave-cassini-@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --- Visit the JPL Cassini home page for more information about the Cassini Project: <http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/>
