What's up in the solar system for the week of July 7

By Emily Lakdawalla

Time to take my weekly census of the spacecraft exploring the solar system.

It looks like a quiet week for Cassini, which continues its stable once-per-week orbits of Saturn; it just this morning passed periapsis (its closest approach) of Rev 75, crossing to the sunlit side of the rings. With the once-per-week orbits periapsis happens on Mondays and apoapsis on Thursdays. The next scheduled close flyby of a moon doesn't happen until July 31. Looking over the recently released raw images, I see several nice multispectral sets on moons -- Enceladus, Mimas, Janus (see below), another Janus, and the Enceladus flyby set from last Monday; other than that, it's mostly rings, rings, and more rings, including a lengthy F ring movie. Also, for those of you who just can't get enough Cassini data, I have received from Björn Jónsson the latest updates to his Microsoft Access database of all Cassini images. The database now contains 169,630 images and occupies 767 MB on my computer. Yikes! That's a lot of data. And that's not even including the images -- it's just all the text and numbers describing the images.

On the surface of Mars, it is early winter in the southern hemisphere (Ls 96°). Today is sol 1,604-5 for Spirit and 1,584-5 for Opportunity. Spirit is still parked on the edge of Home Plate, in the same position it has occupied since sol 1,464 (February 15), with its solar cells pointed northward toward the weak winter sun. The good news from last week is that, apparently, despite the low power levels afforded by the low winter Sun, on sol 1,599 Spirit was able to get back to work taking photos for the panoramic view from its winter position, the Bonestell Pan. According to the vigilant members of unmannedspaceflight.com, the last time any photos were taken for the Bonestell Pan were 40 sols previously, on sol 1,559. The MARCI team continues to report clear skies for Spirit, Opportunity, and Phoenix, but more water ice clouds elsewhere on Mars.

I goofed on last week's Opportunity update -- the panoramic view I showed was from many sols previously. The images were somewhat late being downloaded, and there were a couple of frustrating gaps in the panorama. The panorama is now complete, and below is James Canvin's version of it in all its glory -- quite breathtaking. Opportunity is now much closer to the Cape; I'll show you how much closer when Eduardo Tesheiner updates his route map (he's a little behind because there was a hiccup in the delivery of raw images to the public websites over the last week, but that hiccup is now solved, so I should be able to update you on Opportunity's trek later this week.)

Phoenix is just starting sol 43. The human team took a break over July 4, but the lander was very busy; Mark Lemmon's raw pages for sols 39 and 40 each contain more than 400 images! I have updated my robotic arm camera raw images page to sol 42. I will do a more thorough update on Phoenix status tomorrow.

More at www.planetary.org