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Cassini Heads for 'Higher Ground' at Saturn
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 25, 2016

NASA's Cassini mission is entering its next chapter with an orbital choreography
meant to tilt the spacecraft's orbit out of Saturn's ringplane.

The second of five large propulsive maneuvers in this campaign took place
on Saturday, Jan. 23. Each maneuver in the series sets up a subsequent gravity-assist flyby of Saturn's massive moon Titan, which reshapes the spacecraft's orbit, sending it to increasingly higher inclination with
respect to Saturn's equator.

The 35-second engine burn began at 2:47 p.m. PST (5:47 p.m. EST) on Jan.
23, and changed Cassini's orbital speed around Saturn by about 22.3 feet
per second (6.8 meters per second).

For comparison, the Feb. 1 encounter with Titan that follows this engine firing will change the velocity by 2,539 feet per second (774 meters per second).

"Titan does all the heavy lifting," said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Our job is
to get the spacecraft to a precise altitude and latitude above Titan,
at a particular time, and these large propulsive maneuvers are what keep
us on target to do that."

Cassini will not return again to an orbit near the plane of the rings. Engineers are slowly increasing the tilt of the spacecraft's orbit with respect to Saturn's equator to set up the mission's final, dramatic year.
By late November, the spacecraft will be on a path that will carry it
high above Saturn's poles, approaching just outside the planet's main
rings -- a period the mission team calls the "F-ring orbits." After 20
F-ring orbits, Cassini will begin its Grand Finale event, in which the spacecraft will pass 22 times between the innermost rings and the planet before plunging into Saturn's atmosphere to end its journey on Sept. 15,
2017.

Cassini has been in an equatorial orbit around Saturn since spring 2015,
when it began its final campaign of close encounters with the planet's
large, icy moons. These flybys included the mission's last close brushes
with Hyperion, Dione and Enceladus.

The mission began its current push toward higher inclinations with a burn
on Dec. 30 that changed the spacecraft's speed by 9.8 feet per second
(3 meters per second) in preparation for a Titan flyby on Jan. 15. Another large main engine maneuver, designed to result in a velocity change of
26.08 feet per second (7.95 meters per second), is planned for March 25,
and sets up a Titan flyby on April 4.

"We have an exciting year of Saturn science planned as we head for higher ground. And the views along the way should be spectacular," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about Cassini, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/cassini
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov


Media Contact

Preston Dyches
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-7013
preston.dyches@jpl.nasa.gov

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