Outer C Ring Detail

SATURN DAILY

Outer C Ring Detail

Saturn's outer C ring

Pasadena CA (SPX) Dec 10, 2004
This view of Saturn's outer C ring shows the extreme variations in brightness, along with the subtle, large-scale wavy variations discovered 24 years ago by NASA's Voyager spacecraft.

The notably dark Maxwell gap (near upper right) contains the bright, narrow and eccentric Maxwell ringlet, a Saturnian analog of the narrow Uranian epsilon ring. The gap also contains another very faint ringlet newly discovered by Cassini.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Oct. 29, 2004, at a distance of 838,000 (521,000 miles) from Saturn. The center of this view shows an area located approximately 81,300 kilometers (50,500 miles) from the planet. The image scale is 4.6 kilometers (2.9 miles) per pixel.

Second Battery Depassivation On Huygens

illustration only
Meanwhile, the second run of the Huygens Battery Depassivation sequence was successfully executed on 5 December. Initial indications are that the data looks exactly the same as the first depassivation from 19 September, with all Probe systems exhibiting nominal behaviour.

The depassivation sequence, which was run in "Flight Checkout Suspend" mode and Pre-T0, started at 06:00:00 (SCET/UTC) and lasted for 35 minutes, after which there was a 5 minute pause before the Probe Saving sequence started. This lasted for 8 minutes and was run to ensure that no battery remained connected to the Probe power bus.

Each battery exhibited essentially the same behaviour during each of the 5 minute depassivation periods, with voltages starting at ~65V and slowly increasing to ~70V. Measurements on the bus side showed battery currents of ~1.9A with a similar value being measured from the Cassini line, which indicated an equal sharing of the bus load between battery and Cassini. Bus voltage was steady at 28V.

SATURN DAILY

Seeing In The Dark As Saturn Lights Up Iapetus

Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 09, 2004
Never-before-seen features on the Saturn-facing part of Iapetus' bright trailing hemisphere are visible for the first time, including many dark spots, and a sharper view of a dark, circular structure that was first seen at very low resolution by NASA's Voyager 1 in 1980. Iapetus diameter is 1,436 kilometers (892 miles).

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