Enceladus August 11, 2008 encounter, Close-up observations of plume vents Options

[jasedm]

Bet they're looking for some high-phase optical plume pics.

That would be very cool - this is high speed flyby (compared to most for Cassini) so lots of trade-offs at C/A, but perhaps there will be an attempt to take a number of images over cairo vent 'E', to enable the construction of a crude movie of the plume - similar to that achieved by Voyager 2 at Triton.
It would make sense to concentrate on the day/night terminator, as the plume would show up better against the nightside.

[jmknapp]

Here's another animation, a much less frenetic, real-time view of the first four minutes or so after closest approach:

Enceladus Aug. 2008 flyby, real-time (60MB mpg file)

It starts just before closest approach with the ISS cameras pointing out into space (almost due north). The cameras fixate on the Cairo tiger stripe (vent E) for quite a while. This is only the first four minutes--looks like there's about a half-hour of ISS time possible before the eclipse.

[Floyd]

The Mission Description is up. Link



http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/prod...description.pdf

[Holder of the Tw...]

My appetite is whetted. Big time.

[Juramike]

Here's another animation, a much less frenetic, real-time view of the first four minutes or so after closest approach:

That was beautiful! Thank you for making those!

[Floyd]

Joe, Really great animation!

[Juramike]

CICLOPS description is now up (with a really nice detailed explanation of the camera pointing sequences): http://ciclops.org/view/5156/Enceladus_Rev_80_Flyby

[belleraphon1]

Wow!!!! This is going to be some encounter!!!!

Craig

[ugordan]

A detailed description indeed. Reminds me of the (still definitive) Iapetus imaging sequence plan by Tilmann Denk.

[jmknapp]

CICLOPS description is now up (with a really nice detailed explanation of the camera pointing sequences): http://ciclops.org/view/5156/Enceladus_Rev_80_Flyby

Wow... fantastic detail in the description!

I like the comment at the end from Carolyn Porco: "Prepare to be amazed!"

[nprev]

Yikes they are really going to be diving trough those ice plumes.

Unfortunately, it's too much to hope for a few bugs on the windshield as well...

Not to stray too far OT here, but I really wonder how much material a future Enceladus plume sampling instrument could accumulate doing flybys like this. Perhaps Cassini is testing the water...? (yeah...go ahead & shoot me for that, it's deserved.)

[stevesliva]

They're blogging the encounter here:
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/cassini-aug08/

And there's a pretty sweet encounter video there...

[Holder of the Tw...]

It is a good encounter video, and informative, but I find our own "less frenetic" simulation compliments this new (and official) one pretty well. I like them both.

There has been a lot to look forward to on this mission, but I rate this encounter among my personal big three. First there was the anticipation of the first aerial and surface pictures of Titan from Huygens, and they didn't disappoint. Then there was waiting for the first shots from the Iapetus flyby. Needless to say, well worth the wait.

Now we await the best photos we will see from this mission of the tiger stripe active vents. We will see ...

[jasedm]

Wonderful. This has to be the best flyby yet in terms of availability to the public of instrument plans, sequences and computer simulations of the encounter.
It's very obvious the amount of work and close-scrutiny that has gone into the spacecraft attitude, trajectory, and pointing so that every conceivable opportunity for measurements with all of the instruments can be achieved.
It looks like Cassini will be operating at the absolute limits of its capabilities with regard to screwing as much science as possible out of the flyby - I'm particularly interested to see what comes out of what's being referred to as the 'skeet-shoot' images - it seems very experimental seat-of-the-pants stuff.

I'd be surprised if any spacecraft to date has executed a more complicated list of commands during such a short near-encounter timescale.

Can't wait.

[jmknapp]

Sounds like an impressively complicated and exacting maneuver to get Cassini's rotation to just cancel out Enc's apparent motion during the skeet shoot.

From the description, looks like they're taking just one photo at each of the skeet shoot locations--so no closeup "movies" of plumes? What are the odds the plumes would even be visible, looking down on them?

Hypothetically, anyone know what the typical shutter times are for the ISS cameras in this kind of lighting, also the minimum cycle time in "burst mode"?