Significant Event Report for Week Ending 9/20/2002

Cassini Significant Event Report

For Week Ending 09/20/02

The most recent spacecraft telemetry was acquired from the Goldstone tracking station on Wednesday, September 18. 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.

Instrument activities this week included Radio and Plasma Wave Science High Frequency Receiver calibrations,
execution and playback of Probe Checkout #10, and a Cassini Plasma Spectrometer Gain States Change.
Additional on-board activities included clearing of the CDS error logs and ACS high water marks, and an
autonomous Solid State Recorder Memory Load Partition repair activity.

Sequence development for C34 concluded this week with release of the final products, and a Final Sequence
Integration & Validation meeting. The sequence was then successfully uplinked over Wednesday's pass and
will begin execution on Saturday.

Last week the PC version of the Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) program was delivered by the Mission
Sequence Subsystem (MSS) for installation on the download website. The installation is now complete and
authorized users may download SOA for use on their local PCs. The software is subject to International Traffic
in Arms Regulation restrictions and pre-approval for access to the download site is required.

Hosted by System Engineering, several meetings have been held over the past week to discuss Cassini
Information Management System (CIMS) requirements with the distributed science teams. This effort has
culminated in a 3-hour workshop. A consensus has been obtained on the direction development should take.
Focus is on the CIMS 2.4 delivery some time in November 2002. The Uplink Operations MSS team is now
moving forward to develop detailed requirements and design for the Science Planning Attitude Spread Sheet
and Spacecraft Activity Sequence File interface.

A Software Requirements Certification Review meeting was held for RADAR flight software. The software will
now go through uplink checkout and will be radiated to the spacecraft as part of the activities during C34.

Mission Assurance has scheduled a meeting to discuss Risk Management with the Cassini Principal
Investigators (PIs) during the October Project Science Group meeting. A NASA Independent Review Team
has recommended PI involvement in the Risk Management process and this is the first step towards achieving
participation. Advanced copies of the slides were distributed this week for review.

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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