The Cassini spacecraft has successfully completed its passage through our solar system’s asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. This makes Cassini the seventh spacecraft ever to fly through the asteroid belt. The spacecraft began the crossing in mid-December and while en route obtained images of  asteroid 2685 Masursky.  The most recent spacecraft telemetry data acquired from the Canberra tracking station on Wednesday, 19 April indicates Cassini remains in an excellent state of health and is operating normally.  The speed of the spacecraft can be viewed on the
"Where is Cassini Now?" web page ( "http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cassini/today/" )
 
The C19 background sequence was uplinked this week and began execution. Activities included a reaction wheel momentum dump, clearing of the high water marks, a fault protection log pointer reset, a Solid State Recorder pointer reset, uplink, execution and playback of the Radio Science Subsystem (RSS) High Gain Antenna (HGA) mini-sequence, active Inertial Vector Proprogation (IVP) vector update of the attitude control system, and decontamination of the Cosmic Dust Analyzer instrument. The RSS operations team reported that everything went well for both the X-band and Ka-band calibrations.
 
The C20 Preliminary Sequence Integration and Validation package was released for review and a walkthrough held for the Sequence Test Procedure.
 
System Engineering coordinated a kick-off meeting for the Mission Support Services Office (MSSO) to clarify the tasks performed by the System Administrators (SA) and the Customer Adaptation Team (CAT) for operational configuration of workstations.  The intention is to develop a baseline procedure to improve coordination between the two teams.
 
The Science Operations and Planning Computers are now ready to ship to two distributed instrument operations sites (CIRS and RPWS) and the Huygens Probe Operations Center.
 
Cassini Outreach
Cassini Mission to Saturn and Titan
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
National Aeronautics and Space Administration