[X] My Assistant

[jasedm]

There are some great mid-range and far-out icy moon and rock encounters in the offing over the next month and a half...
Cassini has a break from skimming Titan's cloud-tops and comes within some fairly useful ranges of various other moons.
I don't know how many of the following will be targeted for imagery (Ciclops looking ahead page hints at several), but I'm guessing Hyperion and Enceladus, and hoping for Prometheus and Pan.
The distances I have are from various averaged sources and may be up to 10% out to allow for trajectory changes:

21st Oct - Hyperion 117,000km
24th Oct - Helene 36,000km
24th Oct - Prometheus 105,000km
24th Oct - Janus 150,000km
16th Nov - Rhea 80,000km (everyone's favourite!)
17th Nov - Pan 96,000km
17th Nov - Calypso 94,000km
17th Nov - Enceladus 120,000km
17th Nov - Pandora 88,000km
17th Nov - Epimetheus 95,000km

Echoing sentiments elsewhere on the forum, many congratulations to the Cassini team thus far.

[scalbers]

Here's a try at a Celestia movie for Enceladus Nov 17 that suggests a potential to fill in some map details. After the closest approach there is a period at low phase angles where Enceladus rotates around at a distance of about 250000km.  enceladus2.avi ( 868.5K ) Number of downloads: 452


I hope to use some of the intervening time to iron out a few wrinkles in my triaxial ellipsoid remapping.

EDIT 10/08/2007 2130 UTC: Movie replaced with corrected longitudes (I hope).

[alan]

Why does Enceladus go dark half way through? Is it passing through Saturn's shadow?

[scalbers]

Yes alan, there is an eclipse going on during 11/17.

Another note is that the subpoint is a bit more southerly for this flyby compared with the one from the past week, so despite the farther distance it should be somewhat favorable for mapping of the interesting mid-southerly latitude dark markings. These are good to get while the southern summer is still in progress.

[Holder of the Tw...]

A new sequence of Hyperion images are starting to come up on raw images.

Here is one example.

[jasedm]

Much anticipation on my part for this Hyperion mini-sequence - I think this may be the closest we get to 'old spongy' in the remainder of the mission (primary and extended) and the mission planners seem to be giving it a fairly high priority....
I'm also REALLY looking forward to Cassini making some better-than-voyager observations of Prometheus (closest so far is about 380,000K I believe). It's the only pre-2004 named moon not to have better coverage than voyager achieved.
I'm convinced that this little 'coalescence of snowballs' holds some surprises for us. It seems to be the most intimately ring-associated moon, and the accretion processes are practically visible from frame to frame, when it dips into the inner reaches of the F-ring!!
I suspect it will be very different to Atlas, with it's equatorial concretions when we finally get to see it up close.

[volcanopele]

There will be no observations of Prometheus near C/A. The phase angle at time is very high at the time of closest approach and there is a Saturn near-eclipse observation at the time.

[jasedm]

Yes, it's a shame VP but I live in hope for a close-up or two in the forseeable future....

[OWW]

In case no one noticed... the Hyperion images are in:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...4/N00094340.jpg

[CAP-Team]

I tried to create a "color" image from the UV3/GRN/IR1 images..

Hyperion looks kind a gray

[ugordan]

Assorted moon shots, stretched color:

Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione

[jasedm]

It's amazing how quickly one takes for granted a spacecraft with a decent camera in orbit around Saturn....
I remember as a teenager, poring over the Voyager images and itching to know what lay just past the terminator or over the horizon on some of these icy moons. I visited my local library and photocopied every available Voyager image (pretty slim pickings in most of the astronomy publications back then)
The shots Ugordan has posted above although fairly distant, show territory East of Sabinus on Dione, and Penelope on Tethys that I would have paid a lot of money back then to have seen!
The USGS maps that I have of the various icy moons now look quite quaint and dated compared to the Steve Albers (and others) versions now available - It's a great privilege to be along for the ride as these new territories are opened up to scrutiny, and to be party to some of the informed planetary geology discussions on this board.

[tedstryk]

They really do seem like different worlds. This is partly due to the fact that many of the Voyager images were quite distant and blown up to a ridiculous size. For example here is the best low-phase, complete global view of Dione, showing the "streaky" areas, shown at its original size. I have cleaned it up significantly. However, I have seen this picture in a book blown up to fill a 16x20 page, and without all the black area around it I have put here. Such grossly over-enlarged images give these moons a fuzzy, amorphous feel that Cassini has wiped away.

[jasedm]

The 'looking ahead' section on the ciclops page has been updated for the next revolution - imaging of Enceladus to scrutinise the polar plumes, Rhea from quite a distance, and some shots too of Anthe (I don't imagine these will be more than half a dozen or so pixels across at the most) Also, Saturn eclipses the sun in one of the sequences

[ugordan]

When are the new images scheduled to appear? Not being unpatient here, just feeling slightly uneasy due to the fact no new images were posted since Nov 11.