Cassini-Huygens Mission Status Report

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Carolina Martinez 818-354-9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
carolina.martinez@jpl.nasa.gov

STATUS REPORT: 2009-047 March 12, 2009

Cassini-Huygens Mission Status Report

Cassini Swaps Thrusters

PASADENA, Calif. – Early this morning the Cassini spacecraft relayed information that it had
successfully swapped to a backup set of propulsion thrusters late Wednesday.

The swap was performed because of degradation in the performance of the primary thrusters,
which had been in use since Cassini's launch in 1997. This is only the second time in Cassini's 11
years of flight that the engineering teams have gone to a backup system.

The thrusters are used for making small corrections to the spacecraft's course, for some attitude
control functions, and for making angular momentum adjustments in the reaction wheels, which
also are used for attitude control. The redundant set is an identical set of eight thrusters. Almost
all Cassini engineering subsystems have redundant backup capability.

Cassini has successfully completed its original four-year planned tour of Saturn and is now in
extended mission operations.

More information on the mission is available at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and
the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

-end-

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