[X] My Assistant

[jasedm]

The latest article is available Rev144 .

Lots to look forward to for icy moon/rocks fans (Mimas, Enceladus, Helene and Rhea)

I notice that there's a planned search for Mimas Lagrangians too, with constraints on the size of any putative co-orbitals being <50 metres if nothing's spotted in the two observations. My intuition (nothing more) is that it's unlikely anything will be found - I'd like to be wrong though...

I hope the Helene observations go as planned (closest-approach is ~28,000km) various reasons have conspired to cause the pointing to be a little off in two of the preceding obs.

Helene gets another very close flyby in June this year at ~7000km. I wonder if they'll have another crack with the 'skeet-shooting' technique during that encounter?

Jase

[pat]

The latest article is available Rev144 .

Helene gets another very close flyby in June this year at ~7000km. I wonder if they'll have another crack with the 'skeet-shooting' technique during that encounter?

The flyby is slow enough that Cassini wil be tracking Helene continuously on reaction wheels during approach, flyby and retreat -- no need to skeet shoot, which is just as well because we're not supposed to be doing it any more (too labour intensive)

[Frank Crary]

The flyby is slow enough that Cassini wil be tracking Helene continuously on reaction wheels during approach, flyby and retreat -- no need to skeet shoot, which is just as well because we're not supposed to be doing it any more (too labour intensive)

Strictly speaking. a skeet shoot isn't automatically labor intensive. This is one of several sorts of observations where the Cassini project has to make a hard choice. Doing a skeet shoot without adding too much work would add wear on the reaction wheels (which is a bad idea, if we want the mission to continue until the end of the Solstice mission in 2017.) Finding a way to do a skeet shoot without adding wear on the reaction wheels is possible, but it would take quite a bit of labor on the part of the spacecraft team, and the extended mission work force can't really support that.