[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

The Looking Ahead article for Rev50 was posted on Tuesday:

http://ciclops.org/view.php?id=3800

There are three, non-targeted icy satellite encounters coming up at the end of the month: Dione, Enceladus, and Tethys. The Tethys encounter has a very similar geometry to those we've seen over the last few months, showing the region west of Ithaca Chasma at moderate phase angles. The Dione and Enceladus encounters are much more interesting, IMHO.

The Dione encounter will cover the sub-Saturnian hemisphere. A large mosaic is planned over that hemisphere at 270-300 m/pixel (around 20 footprints IIRC). This would allow coverage of the wispy terrain terrain there at phase angles which should make the view pretty dramatic. Also, the impact basins of the leading hemisphere should be quite visible.

The Enceladus encounter will provide the best view to date of Enceladus' leading hemisphere.

[The Messenger]

Space is hard. I don't think there is anything comparible to the years of success we have enjoyed from the Cassini mission; and even with complete failure at any time in the future, this mission should go into the books as the most successful space voyage period.

If you have followed the event log closely, Cassini has experience a much-higher-than-expected rate of two bit errors. (Was it Rosetta or V Express that recently posted a similar worry?). Cosmic ray switching is unavoidable; the sluggishness in the reaction wheels is hamstringing. The ability of the spacecraft to recover from these incidents is a remarkable citation of the adaptive skills and forsight of the Cassini team. (All of whom should be wearing well-deserved insult-proof skin by now.) For more than ten years they have kept an intricate game of tetras going from the end of a time-delayed joy stick.

Even more important, there may be unexpected gems of science found in the unexpected clam shelling of Cassini during closest approach. Unplanned safe modes during Galileo's closest approaches were the hallmark of the mission. Likewise Voyager (I?) clamshelled during a close ring pass. With all the unexpected visual candy we are witnessing, no one should be surprised if unanticipated electromagnetic/gravitational/particle/plasma/magnitotails/gremlins are influencing the spacecraft in unanticipated and yet to be characterized ways.

[ustrax]

Relax a bit muchachos!
I'm sure Cousins-O'Higgins has still plenty of tresor arcs to open before our eager eyes...

[tedstryk]

In addition to the inherent difficulties of operating a mission like Cassini, I think our perspective is clouded by the fact that earlier missions, such as Voyager, Viking, and the Mariners had plenty of missed shots, shots that were lost in transmission, and smeared shots. In fact, of one looks at the old Voyager raw images on the PDS (and I don't mean when the scan platform was stuck at Saturn), one will see that not every imaging attempt worked out.
However because we didn't have lists in advance for these missions of all the frames that would be taken and only saw selected, processed images in print publications (as opposed to the RAW jpegs), the encounters came off looking flawless. Frames that were not transmitted, targeted, or received, so long as there was no major outage, such as with Voyager's scan platform at Saturn, were not missed by anyone except a handful of scientists. Now, with targeting lists and the jpegs appearing right away, every little problem is noticed, creating a distorted perspective.