SOI tonight!!
image source http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA05413_modest.jpg
Hey Kari:
Things were buzzing at JPL here in Southern California during the Mars Rover Landings. Well, JPL's "party animal" engineers and scientists are at at it again with tonight's SOI (Saturn orbital insertion) as the Cassini-Huygens reaches a big milestone.
If you are curious, check out the information about the Cassini orbiter.
image source: http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/59932main_spacecraft-rotating-11.gif
And check out the description of the Huygens probe.
image source http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/59916main_8_1.jpg
Here's hoping for some great pictures post-SOI!
Rene
UPDATE: Woooooo hoooooo! Cassini-Huygens is in orbit and sending photos.
image source http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/61705main_soi8-516.jpg
UPDATE: Here are the observations from one of my friends who was an invited guest at JPL's SOI watch night party.
We were a jubilant group of family and friends who came out to support and to witness the insertion of Cassini onto Saturn's orbit. The crowd was cheering at every announced turning point of the procedure.Hooray!
There were no live pictures of the insertion itself but we were provided a live video feed from Mission Control along with audio from various engineers monitoring Cassini and interviews with scientists involved in the project. There was also a doppler graph which took live radio transmission from Cassini. From the graph, you can infer it's speed and the various blips which indicated to us we were passing through Saturn's rings.
2 Comments:
Amazing images. Are they all black-and-white, or do they just appear that way?
I figured that color photos take up more bandwidth to download. Imagine Cassini as one of the tin cans on a very long string to the Deep Space Network here on earth!
Anyway, I did email my "rocket science" friend and asked him about the color photo issue.
His reply:
I'm sure there will be color photos, but you're right, they take more bandwidth, so the b&w are higher priority. They took some shots prior to arrival, though.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06077
The high-res color camera has already been used at Jupiter, too.
http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/view.php?id=79
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