Welcome to my Cassini Pages. (Please note that I do not officially represent the Cassini project, JPL, or NASA. Any opinion expressed herein is mine) I certainly do not want to duplicate any of the excellent information or materials that you can find at the official JPL/NASA Cassini Web Site. I do want to communicate a little of my personal experience working on the Cassini mission, not as a JPL employee, but as an aerospace engineer / spacecraft navigator. I may be a little presumptuous here, assuming that someone is actually interested in reading any of this :) but I know that I would be. And, if I wasn't involved in this, I know I'd be interested in finding out what's going on from the inside.
I won't speak much about the rest of the Navigation team here, except to say that
there are nine of us. Throughout the mission that number will
change.
If you're interested in what's currently going on or been going on, you may want
to check the Significant
Events Report, join a public Cassini
e-mail list, or join JPL's Cassini
e-mail list.
There's some more stuff that I haven't organized,
yet. Feel free to email
me or sign my guestbook
to give feedback on this page.
Swingbys
Maneuvers
Launch
Let me say first that launch was absolutely incredible -- quite a
rush. The Titan
(see also: U.S. Air Force Titan Systems Division)
is really something to see. Even though I wasn't at the Cape, the sense of urgency,
reality, and surreality was prevalent. To the left is an image of the launch pin
issued by the Air Force.
There are some really nice reports
by traditional media. One
of my favorites is at ABC news; CNN
has a pretty good Cassini-site,
too. Fox News has a good RealVideo
movie of the
launch. JPL has good
ones , too.You can also find some good pictures of the launch at KSC:
(1)-
(2)-
(3)-
(4)
For the curious, the ascent profile looked a lot like this, for the SAX
launch (just replace Atlas
with Titan
IV/B SRMU)
Astrophotographer & astronomer Gordon
Garradd has taken some spectacular photos
of Cassini and the Centaur
as they passed over Australia.
Spacewatch also got some good
shots of the spacecraft.
Trajectory
I've been trained for maneuver
analysis (flight path control), not trajectory analysis or orbit
determination. However, I felt the urge to put together a little movie of Cassini's trajectory.
I've finished the inner cruise portion (843K), plus
closeups of the Launch (500K), Venus-1
(588K), and Venus-2 (496K) portions. The rest is forthcoming.
The movies are in MPEG
format. On a Macintosh, you may want Sparkle
but there are other
options. On a Windows95 PC, you may want LadyBug
but there are other
options.
I have made made a diagram (49K) that shows the layout of
a typical frame from my movies. I've included the current date, most recent mission
event, heliocentric velocity, total distance travelled to-date, and classical
orbital elements (semimajor
axis, eccentricity,
inclination,
right ascension,
argument of
perigee, and true
anomaly). Ever since I saw the
layout of Cassini's trajectory, I've wanted to get a feel for the progression
of the osculating
orbit as the
spacecraft travels to Saturn. The yellow, dotted line in the movie is just that.
(If this paragraph lost you, you may want to read from JPL's
"How do you fly
to Saturn?," "Basics of Spaceflight"
or Alex da Silva Curiel's
Orbital Motion.)
On the other hand, if you like to delve into the technical details, you might
be interested in reading about Cassini's preliminary design in
D'Amario, L.A., Byrnes, D.V., Diehl, R.E., Bright, L.E., and Wolf, A.A., "Preliminary
Design for a Proposed Saturn Mission with a Second Galileo Spacecraft," Journal
of the Astronautical Sciences, Vol. 37, No. 3, 1989, pp. 307-331
A rendition of where
Cassini is in space now is available from SPACE.
You may be interested in checking
out our next stop, Jupiter, as seen by Cassini. Just put today's date and desired picture size into
the form below, and SPACE will generate
an image for you. The Jupiter swingby was slated for December 30, 2000
(already entered below). The swingby distance (closest-approach) was about ___
km, or a Jupiter-relative altitude of ___ km (about ___ miles). However, I don't think
SPACE is loaded with the latest trajectory.
The Horizons database (also
available as "telnet ssd.jpl.nasa.gov
6775") is updated more regularly.
