12-March-2008, 06:06 PM
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Senior Member
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Join Date: Mar 2004
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1 hour to flyby
JPL Cassini-Huygens
1 hour to flyby
NASA Blog: Enceladus-flyby-Mar2008
Quote:
[Amanda Hendrix]: Well our flyby sequence has officially started!! Last night we began our observations of Enceladus! We are very distant, but getting closer all the time, over the northern hemisphere. The first observation was a long stare at Enceladus, which is still pretty far away and small, but this is a nice opportunity to do compositional measurements. As of 9 a.m. Pacific, radar observation of Enceladus began, which will give us an idea of the roughness of this side of Enceladus, at centimeter scales. The closest approach is around 1 p.m. Pacific today.
The entire flyby sequence is on-board the spacecraft, and there's really no opportunity to change it at this point. We're in it for good. However, the sequence gets thoroughly tested prior to uplink, so we are confident that things will go smoothly. The next time we hear from Cassini will be tonight after the flyby at around 7 p.m. Pacific.
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Quote:
[John Spencer:] Today's Enceladus flyby is a bit more adventurous than most satellite flybys by Cassini.
We are dipping into the jet of water vapor and ice spewing from Enceladus' south pole, because by doing so we can take full advantage of the amazing opportunity to study
fresh samples from inside this strange world. The mass spectrometer, dust, and plasma
instruments will be running flat-out, gathering priceless information on the composition
of the gases and the ice particles for the sixty seconds or so that Cassini will be in
the dense part of the plume.
Plume particles are wonderful things to study, but it's possible to have too much of a
good thing - at the speed that Cassini is going, particles as small as a millimeter in
size could cause serious damage to the spacecraft if we ran into one. So the decision to
enter the plume was not taken lightly. [...]
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More detail and more entries there.
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