It looks like Cassini will pass relatively close to Iapetus within the next few days. Does anyone know how close?

I hadn't heard about an Iapetus close encounter on orbit "0" -- only the upcoming very close pass by Titan.

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List of close passes here.

Only passes closer than 65,000 km or so appear to be listed.

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tlbs101-

The Iapetus flyby on this orbit was at about 1.1 million km; the closest previous one by Cassini was around 2.4 million. The 65,000 km encounter scheduled for the end of this year on orbit C as shown on the list ToSeek posted has recently been changed to about 121,000 km. There was a concern that Iapetus' gravity would affect the trajectory of the Huygens probe (traveling a few thousand km from the orbiter at that point), so they backed off a bit.

And as an update to my post in another thread a few days ago http://badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewto...c&start=25
there are a couple of more narrow angle images that partially show Iapetus. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedi...iImageID=23928
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedi...iImageID=23597

Thanks! That's the kind of detail I am interested in.

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I see that the Iapetus pointing error is addressed in the new Signfiicant Events report:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/pres...41015-ws-a.cfm

I read on another board that the closest approach won't happen for a day or so - I thought that it had already happened.

I know what you mean about wanting more details. I'm closer to the action than a lot of people but I still don't have keys to the inner sanctum for the really detailed information. :-? .
For example, I understand that an animation of the Titan flyby showing locations of instrument fields of view has been released but not to the public. I don't know if they will.

Take a look on the Cassini Present Position Page:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operation...t-position.cfm
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/operation...ini_today4.jpg

The orbit of Iapetus is shown in grey so its hard to figure which of the tiny grey dots is meant to be Iapetus, but i'm sure Cassini has yet to make it's closest appraoch.

Yeah, I got that wrong. If this animation http://solarsystem.dlr.de/PG/cassini...of_Iapetus.mov is still correct for this encounter, closest approach appears to be during the evening/morning on the 17th/18th.

LOTS of images of Iapetus DEAD centre in the frame just posted

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedi.../raw/index.cfm

hmm....I spoke too soon, lots of new RAW images released today, many seem to have missed Iapetus. Does Cassini have a pointing problem or was this intentional?

I'm more concerned about what the woo woos will make out of images like this. :-?

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