[X] My Assistant

[Bjorn Jonsson]

Now that Tc will soon be over I have started looking at T3 which includes the first close icy satellite flyby since Phoebe, a roughly 1400 km non-targeted (!) Enceladus flyby.

I did a quick animation of this flyby. It is available at:

http://www.mmedia.is/bjj/misc/css_stuff/css_enceladus_t3.avi

Warning: It's almost 6 megabytes.

It starts on 17 February at 03:15 UTC and ends at 03:45. The distance from Enceladus at either end of the animation is roughly 6000 km and the field of view is 16 degrees. As can be seen features that were imaged fairly well by Voyager 2 will be in view.

[tedstryk]

Why is this T3? Shouldn't it be T4?

[Mongo]

As I understand it, the original two orbits were replaced with three, because it was decided to wait to deploy the Huygen probe due to a reciever problem on board Cassini (its bandwidth was much smaller than expected).

Nobody wanted to rename all the orbits, so the first two orbits, T1 and T2 were replaced with Ta, Tb and Tc in order that orbit T3 (originally the third orbit, now the fourth) and all later orbits could retain their name.

Bill