Mission Control is the heart of Flight Operations for unmanned, robotic spacecraft missions such as Galileo, Voyager, and Cassini-Huygens. All of the activities for tracking Cassini are controlled from within the Space Flight Operations Facility at JPL.

Cassini Ace Robert Springfield at Mission Control in JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility

One person is on site at all times when the Cassini spacecraft is being tracked in real time. This person is the mission controller, also called the "Ace." Depending on what activities are scheduled for a particular day, there may be dozens of others involved with the Ace by voice-net, telephone, or e-mail while they check system status, or send commands "up" to the distant spacecraft. It is the Ace's job to ensure that all the spacecraft's data are acquired, checked, stored, and distributed. That way, the engineers and scientists responsible for the spacecraft subsystems, the science experiments, and for navigation can always access the data when they need to.

The computer workstations the Ace is watching in the above image show displays of the spacecraft's health and safety, as well as the real time status of the Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas and systems that link together to provide two-way communications with the spacecraft.