[X] My Assistant

[Hungry4info]

A nice shot of Janus.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...3/N00163151.jpg

Some more (severe) data drop outs v_v.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/imag...2/N00163150.jpg

[elakdawalla]

Unlike MER, Cassini doesn't release raw images if their first transmission had data gaps; JPL holds back release of any Cassini images with data dropouts, in the hopes that Cassini will be able to retransmit the data. Once in a while, Cassini empties its data recorders (usually but not always in preparation for a targeted flyby) and then JPL has to give up on getting better versions of the images, with the result that you'll suddenly see a big batch of images with data dropouts and old dates hit the raw images website.

[Frank Crary]

Cassini empties the recorders every few days, and almost never retransmits data. Retransmission is a planned, automatically-play-back-twice practice that's reserved for Titan and icy satellite encounters. You're probably seeing the difference between data the DSN sends to JPL immediately, and the "bested" data. There is some level of error correcting that the DSN can do, to recover packets corrupted in transmission, which they can't do on the fly. That is usually available a few days after the bits hit the ground. The really ratty data is probably from downlinks where the conditions were so bad that no amount of reprocessing and error correction can help.