Written by Preston Dyches
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena, CA – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will execute the largest planned maneuver of the spacecraft’s remaining mission on Saturday, August 9th. The maneuver will target Cassini toward an August 21st encounter with Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
The main engine firing will last about a minute and will provide a change in velocity of 41 feet per second (12.5 meters per second). This is the largest maneuver by Cassini in five years.
By contrast, the smallest maneuvers Cassini routinely executes are about 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) per second.
The large size of the August 9th burn is needed to begin the process of “cranking down” Cassini’s orbit, so that the spacecraft circles Saturn nearer to the plane of the rings and moons. Previously, with each Titan flyby, mission controllers adjusted the spacecraft’s orbit to be increasingly inclined, carrying Cassini high above Saturn’s polar regions. The upcoming maneuver starts reversing that trend, making the orbit increasingly close to the equator.
Although Cassini has occasionally performed similar large propulsive maneuvers during its decade in the Saturn system, Titan itself has proven to be the workhorse for steering Cassini around Saturn. It is not uncommon for the spacecraft to receive a gravitational assist, or boost, from Titan that rivals or exceeds the 96-minute engine burn Cassini performed in 2004 to insert itself into Saturn orbit.
The Cassini mission recently celebrated a decade studying Saturn, its rings, moons and magnetosphere.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.
For more information about Cassini, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
