Cassini Mission

On October 6, 1997, the Cassini spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral using a Titan IV Centaur launch vehicle. The Cassini weighing more than 5000 kg (5.5 tons) at launch, the spacecraft was too heavy to be injected into a direct trajectory to Saturn. A boost from the Titan IV/Centaur and several planetary gravity assists were needed for Cassini to arrive with sufficient propellant to brake into orbit around Saturn. The Centaur performed maneuvers to send Cassini on a Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter Gravity Assist (VVEJGA) trajectory to Saturn.

The Cassini spacecraft reached the system of Saturnus. The distance of spacecraft form Saturn is less than 70 million kilometers, near to final approach.

Participation in Cassini mission

The CASSINI space probe will be study Saturn and the interplanetary region. This research work started in late 1990; NASA accepted two proposals, submitted with the participation of groups from our institute. This paved the way to joining in the scientific data interpretation by providing ground support equipment for the magnetometer (MAG) and a charged particle detector (CAPS) for the spacecraft. The objective of these experiments was to observe charged particles and the magnetic field in the magnetosphere of Saturn and in the neighborhood of Titan. It should be stressed that one technical development, the EGSE, provides the opportunity to participate in more than one experiment. The work relating to the onboard software of both experiments has also been commenced. KFKI RMKI is responsible for developing the EGSE and some of the onboard software for the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) as well as for the magnetometer (MAG). The EGSE consists of a PC and a Sun workstation as nodes of an ethernet network, and comprises a combination of software and hardware components to provide:

1. instrument interfaces for simulation of spacecraft control subsystems and acquiring housekeeping and science data by Mil-Std-1553B serial bus,
2. power and pyro subsystem simulation,
3. temperature acquisition subsystem simulator,
4. user interfaces for monitoring, logging and manipulating the data and control transactions associated to CAPS on the spacecraft onboard network,
5. gateway functions between a TCP/IP type local network and the Mil-Std-1553B serial bus for controlling the test sequence and data display from a remote station (Sun) and gathering data on a magnetic tape back-up system,
6. calibration mechanism to correlate science data and calibration parametric data, etc.

The special dedicated interface PC cards (Spacecraft simulators) and windows oriented software for Sun and PC are in the development by KFKI RMKI to fulfill these previous requirements.

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 Comments to Pál VIZI  p.vizi@rmki.kfki.hu  

 Contact to Sándor SZALAI szalai@rmki.kfki.hu