[X] My Assistant

[Guest_paulanderson_*]

Just a reminder that the press briefing is tomorrow (November 30, 2005) at 10:00 am ET / 7:00 am PT and will be shown live on NASA TV:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/nov/H...s_Briefing.html

[tedstryk]

Just a reminder that the press briefing is tomorrow (November 30, 2005) at 10:00 am ET / 7:00 am PT and will be shown live on NASA TV:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/nov/H...s_Briefing.html

Some major discoveries will be announced, including:

Titan has an atmosphere
The Hellas and Argyre basins on Mars are of impact origin.
Mars has large volcanos in the Tharsis region.
Mars has two moons.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Maybe. Anyway, here's the story from the 1-31-05 Aviation Week:

"Mission operations experts said there was an opportunity to catch the problem in a March 2003 rehearsal of the descent, and suggested that a heavy workload at the time and export-control rules conspired to hide the problem...

"Careful examination of the rehearsal engineering telemetry provided by the PSA [Probe Support Avionics package] would have shown that the RUSO [Receiver Ultra-Stable Oscillator] was off. But, because of the pointing angle of the Cassini antenna, during the rehearsal it was not possible for it to receive simulated Huugens radio signals coming from Earth. That allowed the missing RUSO instruction to remain obscured because actual RF operation of the receivers was not tested.

"Under the workshare agreement between JPL and ESA, this telemetry was provided to ESA for review without being examined by JPL, which at the time was busy preparing for Saturn orbit Insertion. ESA's inquiry is trying to determine how the problem was missed.

"The general agreement between JPL and ESA is to draw a line between the probe and the orbiter and define the interface between the two. Then each agency proceeds, sticking mainly to its own side. On the orbiter, this line was drawn between the PSA and the rest of the spacecraft. JPL acts as a courier service for ESA's binary commands to the PSA and data coming out of the PSA, which are decoded by ESA.

"This divided workshare is partly to simplify the arrangement, but it is also driven by ITAR [regulations] that seek a clear boundary and discourage JPL from providing assistance to ESA. Roles were separated in ground tests as well. When the PSA was tested at JPL, ESA engineers took the data and left, in part due to ITAR. As a result, there haven't been any systems engineers operating across the JPL/ESA interface on Cassini/Huygens. 'You have to have a systems enginer for the entire link or you are dommed,' one official said.

"David Southwood, ESA's science director, has made it clear from the outset that he considers his agency responsible for the error. But he noted last week that the problem 'clearly lies on the boundary between ESA and NASA, and so does ITAR.

" 'We are not against security measures by the US or anyone else, but we need to have effective international cooperation,' he said. 'We don't want this event to cause us to pull back [on cooperation], but interface issues are clearly part of the story.' "

[mcaplinger]

"David Southwood, ESA's science director, has made it clear from the outset that he considers his agency responsible for the error. But he noted last week that the problem 'clearly lies on the boundary between ESA and NASA, and so does ITAR...

Such interfaces are a potential problem, worthy of great scrutiny, regardless of whether they cross international boundaries. Southwood says himself, and this seems clearly the case from the facts in evidence, that this is ESA's error. If they knew the interface was critical, they should have been paying more attention to it. They built the receiver system on Cassini and it was their responsibility to insure it had been commanded into the right mode.

I'd read about this in the official ESA review, had they ever released any such thing.