Enhanced Cassini Support

During FY18, PDS worked closely with the Cassini mission and instrument teams to develop material to make it easier to find and use Cassini data. Some of those enhancements are available at the Ring-Moon Systems Node where most of our focus is on the optical remote sensing instruments. If you don’t find what you need in our pages, please check the PDS’s Cassini Archive Page which has been established as an overall clearing house for Cassini support.

Enhanced support available at the Ring-Moon Systems Node:

  • Consistent single-valued mission phase names

    The document MISSION.CAT defines Cassini mission phases with a three-tiered structure. For example, an image that was taken on 2000 December 30 could be defined as part of the Outer Cruise (1999-11-08 to 2002-07-07), or its sub-phase the Jupiter Cruise (2000-11-05 to 2001-04-30), or its sub-sub-phase the Jupiter Encounter (2000-12-30 only). And yet, the MISSION_PHASE_NAME keyword in PDS3 and the cassini:mission_phase_name attribute in PDS4 both are single-valued. The resulting ambiguity is compounded by the fact that, in their archives as delivered to PDS, different instruments made different choices regarding the mission phase names that they entered as metadata into their data products, some of which are not allowable values at all.

    For PDS4 data sets curated by RMS, we have solved this problem by defining a list of mission phases that gives a single consistent value for each moment of time during the mission. The list is as follows:

    • First, short encounters that interrupt longer periods:
      • Venus 1 Encounter: 1998-116
      • Venus 2 Encounter: 1999-175
      • Earth Encounter: 1999-230
      • Jupiter Encounter: 2000-365
      • Phoebe Encounter: 2004-163
      • Saturn Orbit Insertion: 2004-183
      • Titan A Encounter: 2004-300
      • Titan B Encounter: 2004-348
    • Then, full-length periods that completely cover the mission timeline:
      • Interplanetary Cruise: 1997-001 to 1999-311
      • Outer Cruise: 1999-312 to 2002-188
      • Science Cruise: 2002-189 to 2004-011
      • Approach Science: 2004-012 to 2004-162
      • Tour Pre-Huygens: 2004-163 to 2004-358
      • Huygens Probe Separation: 2004-359
      • Huygens Descent: 2004-360 to 2005-013
      • Titan C Huygens: 2005-014
      • Tour: 2005-015 to 2008-182
      • Equinox Mission: 2008-183 to 2010-272
      • Solstice Mission: 2010-273 to end of mission

  • Preview products and the keys to their interpretation

    The PDS Ring-Moon Systems Node generates browse images or footprint diagrams for data at the Ring-Moon Systems Node. These are used in the results gallery view for OPUS. Links to preview products for each volume are provided in the “Access Data” pages of the respective instrument information pages. You may browse through our entire collection of browse products here.

    We attempt to convey a lot of information, so intrepreting our preview products, especially for data submitted in cube form, can be challenging. Here are keys to assist in their interpretion.

  • Preview Product Keys

  • Downloadable tables of enhanced geometric metadata

    The PDS Ring-Moon Systems Node generates detailed metadata about Saturn and its satellites to support searches using OPUS. We currently produce supplemental metadata for Cassini ISS, UVIS, and VIMS. CIRS metadata may be available near the end of FY16.

    Tables of that metadata are available for browsing and downloading. Each instrument subdirectory contains browsable metadata by volume.

    The metadata is organized by data volume for each instrument (e.g., ISS volume 2001 has a set of tables). For each volume we provide four tables with their associated PDS labels which include column descriptions. Three of the tables provide geometric metadata for the moons of Saturn, the Rings of Saturn, and for Saturn. The fourth table, nnnn_index.tab, list all of the detectable (e.g., satellites completly obscured behind the planet are not included) targets in the instrument field of view.

    The tables are updated quarterly shortly after we receive the Cassini quarterly delivery.

ISS

  • Browse and download ISS geometry tables for individual volumes of Jupiter or Saturn data.
  • Browse and download cumulative geometry tables for the entire Jupiter or Saturn data sets.

UVIS

VIMS

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