[March 6, 2008

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As you may already know, Cassini is set to begin a series of scraping
Enceladus flybys that will take place in 2008. The first one occurs
next week on March 12, and will take us flying within a mere 50 km (~ 30
miles) over the equatorial region of the moon, approaching from the
north and then departing towards the south, with passage through the
edges of the moon's famous south polar plume. This very low altitude
is about one seventh (1/7) the distance that the International Space
Station flies above the Earth and is the closest we've flown yet to any
object in the Saturn system.

We should come away from this flyby with a better idea of the
composition of the plume, in particular, a better measure than we've had
up until now of the abundances of ammonia and some simple organic
compounds, both of which are important to ascertaining the
astrobiological potential of the source environment of the jets.

Today, CICLOPS is releasing a detailed description of the sequence of
observations that will take place during this event, and a map
previewing the imaging coverage that is planned.

Go to ...

http://ciclops.org

]

--- Also --- for Star Trek fans (and congratulations to Carolyn Porco!) ---

[Also, owing to email distribution problems we recently had here at
CICLOPS, it seems that the vast majority of you never received the Star
Trek announcement that we sent out ... twice ... about a month ago. If
this is true for you, the announcement can be found at

http://diamondskyproductions.com/news/2-11-2008.php

In the meantime, stay tuned for Enceladus!

Enjoy,

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director/CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO]