Cassini Significant Event Report
For Week Ending 11/01/02

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, October 30. The Cassini spacecraft is in an excellent state of health and is operating normally. Information on the spacecraft's position and speed can be viewed on the "Present Position" web page.

On board activities this week included clearing of the ACS high water marks, and an autonomous Solid State Recorder Memory Load Partition repair. Additional instrument activities included Radio and Plasma Wave Science High Frequency Receiver calibrations and a high rate cyclic, and an upload of new RADAR Flight Software (FSW). The existing version of the flight software will be maintained on board until after a checkout is performed in early November. After this activity the old version will be overwritten with the new version, ensuring that multiple copies of the newest FSW are available to the instrument.

The 29th session of the Cassini Project Science Group meeting concluded this week. Principal investigators, co-investigators, operations technical leads, graduate students, and interested members of the flight team attended various working groups, team meetings, plenary sessions, demonstrations and training sessions over a 5-day period.

The Navigation Ancillary Information Facility hosted a two day Spacecraft, Planet, Instruments, C-matrix, and Events kernels (SPICE) tutorial workshop with participants from Cassini, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Odyssey, Mars Express, Deep Impact, Mars Exploration Rover, Messenger, Space Infrared Telescope Facility, and LMA. SPICE is the ancillary information system that provides access to scientists and engineers for spacecraft orbit, attitude and similar information needed to determine observation geometry used in planning and analyzing space science observations.

A delivery coordination meeting was held for Mission Sequence Subsystem version D8.0.4 software. Changes included updates to SSR Management Tool, SEQGEN and SEG, and a small change to the PC-version of the Science Opportunity Analyzer tool.

The topic at this week's Mission Planning forum dealt with DSN requirements - what is the process for defining/enforcing them, how are we performing so far vs. our DSN requirements, and what are the proposed updates for the next DSN allocation board meeting? Also discussed was a proposed constraint on waypoints. Can the waypoint strategy be waived on some occasions?

Mission Assurance conducted a Risk Management Quarterly Team Meeting this week. Risks associated with Saturn Tour Operations were addressed and dispositioned. Action items to refine risk descriptions were assigned as needed. The next Quarterly Meeting will be conducted in January 2003, to discuss risks to Saturn Orbit Insertion.

A meeting was conducted between Mission Assurance and Section 319 Problem Reporting System (PRS) representatives. The PRS group has been working on a new unified problem reporting system, to replace the current institutional one. Features of the new system were demonstrated and the possibility of migrating Cassini to the new system was discussed. Cassini is considering a transition to the new PRS to assist developers with actual user feedback and at the same time, benefit from some of the new functionality and reporting features.

Additional information about Cassini-Huygens is online at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Cassini will begin orbiting Saturn on July 1, 2004, and release its piggybacked Huygens probe about six months later for descent through the thick atmosphere of the moon Titan. Cassini is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

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