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Old 02-June-2008, 07:33 PM
Karl Karl is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: USA
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Cassini uses distributed operations, meaning that each of the instruments needs to maintain an operations team that works with the spacecraft team to generate sequences of commands that are integrated together and sent to the spacecraft. Since Cassini has no scan platform (thrown off early in the design process to save money) pointing the cameras means pointing the entire spacecraft. There are a lot of constraints on what pointing angles are legal, keeping sun off of radiators for instance, so there is a lot of back and forth to come up with an optimized command sequence.
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