Radio atmospheric profiles?, Is Cassini doing this regularly? Options

[J.J.]

A question I had about the Galileo mission (that I never bothered to ask), and one that I have about this one is: is Cassini performing regular radio occultation experiments each time it passes behind Saturn? It seems to make sense that it is, but IIRC I haven't seen any mention of such profiles in press releases, perhaps because it's mundane or taken for granted.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

A question I had about the Galileo mission (that I never bothered to ask), and one that I have about this one is: is Cassini performing regular radio occultation experiments each time it passes behind Saturn? It seems to make sense that it is, but IIRC I haven't seen any mention of such profiles in press releases, perhaps because it's mundane or taken for granted.

I thought I had seen a press release or two but you may be right. I guess these results don't tend to be as "sexy" as, say, ISS or VIMS data, though they are just as important to Cassini's Saturn Working Group (SWG).

In any event, RSS has performed several Saturn atmospheric and ionospheric occultations in the tour to date (e.g., during S07, S08, S09, S10, S11, etc.) and has provided data on, for example, the temperature vs. pressure structure at select latitudes.

[J.J.]

^
Thanks much.

[edstrick]

I presume Galileo did radio occultation observations, but they would have been severely degraded by the poor signal-to-noise ration due to the low signal strength of the Galileo Omnidirectional antenna.