**FTS-NASA-VOICE**

**July 26, 2005**

**1:00 p.m. CDT**

Coordinator Good afternoon, and thank you for standing by. Today's
conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may
disconnect at this time. You may begin.

Dr. Grazier Well hello, everybody. Trina, are you going to do the
introduction?

Trina Yes. Let me go ahead and do that. Thanks, everybody, for joining
us on the July CHARM telecon. We've sort of just been having a series of
really exciting telecons recently, and we had the big sort of one-year
anniversary telecon last month. So we decided to sort of take a breath
this month and take a look at the whole tour, and take a look at how we
got to where we are.

This is a nice point in the tour for sort of people to be breathing.
We're kind of in a lull of Titan flybys. We haven't had one in several
months, and we don't have one for another month or two. So it's a really
good time for reflection, and we're very pleased today to have Dr. Kevin
Grazier with us. He's an investigation scientist on the mission, but
more importantly, he's been involved with the mission for probably well
over ten years. He was instrumental in the tour design phase, and
choosing the tour. He was really deeply involved in that effort, and has
a terrific perspective on that. With that, I'll turn it over to Dr.
Grazier.

Dr. Grazier And you forgot my other background is, pursuant to the
conversation we had before the recording starting, I'm also the science
advisor on *Battlestar Galactica.*

M Oh, cool.

Dr. Grazier I knew that would get a reaction from somebody. Anyway, if
you have the viewgraphs that I put up on the Web in front of you, we'll
start obviously at the beginning. We talk a little bit about how we
ended up with the tour that we have, the current series of orbits we
have at Saturn and then after talking about the history of how we got
here, let's look at what each segment of the mission is designed to do
because these orbits aren't random. Each series of orbits has a specific
intent. So if you look at the first viewgraph about the history.

Initially, when the announcement of opportunity came out; in other
words, when NASA said, "Okay. We're going to go to Saturn. Scientists,
propose something. What instruments do you want to be on the spacecraft
and why? What science do you intend to do?" Well they initially put out
a tour, a series of orbits at Saturn. Now that was called 8901, the
first tour of 1989, and it was very Galileo like.

Now I will compare this to Galileo often because it's the mission that's
most similar to Cassini. The Galileo mission, however, stayed in the
equatorial plane of Jupiter because that's where, for the most part, the
interesting stuff at Jupiter is, at least for a first pass. The Juno
mission will actually go 90 degrees from that when it arrives, but
Galileo stayed in the plane because that's where the satellites are,
etc.

So that's what we had at 8901, but people realized that that doesn't
work for Saturn because the "cool" stuff isn't necessarily in the ring
plane because if you look at the rings, which are 30 meters thick at
most - the main rings - edge on, you don't see much. So that argued for
a new tour.

So 9201 was designed. Actually, this was also very similar to Galileo.
It's still very equatorial. It had 63 orbits, 33 Titan flybys - I'm on
the next viewgraph, by the way - had four targeted satellite flybys. In
other words, targeted flybys are flybys that are intentionally close.
There are other flybys that are serendipitously close, but the targeted
flybys are the ones we actually aim to get within a certain distance of
the satellite. We had 12 non-targeted flybys - 50,000 kilometers or less
and some occultation sequences, and we'll discuss the significance of
that a little later on.

If you go to the next viewgraph, the PSG, the Cassini Project Science
Group; in other words, the total of the scientists, the PIs, co-I's,
team leader on Cassini and the project here at JPL - they agreed to look
at different tours between 1993 and 1996. The understanding was that the
Galileo like tours just don't cut it for Saturn because to get Saturn
science done correctly, or at least exhaustively, you have to have
excursions in inclination, in a tilt of the orbit so you can see down on
the rings. Also particles and fields people like to be at high
inclinations to measure the magnetic field at different orientations.

So there were different discipline working groups created, scientists
who are experts in different fields and these are scientists from
different instruments on the spacecraft. So we had atmospheres group -
primarily these were imaging people - MAPS - that's magnetosphere and
particle science team - satellites group, rings group, and they
developed a list of things that each group wanted to see. That allowed
tour designers to know what to shoot for when they're designing their
tour.

So a tool was created - an Excel spreadsheet, believe it or not. It was
called Stock. It allowed tour designers, and we had two of those - John
Smith is actually still on the mission in mission planning - design
numerous tours to study and for people like actually myself and my boss
at the time, Nicole Rapport, to do analyses on and to look at the
science returns.

There is a new orbit rotation technique identified called the Titan 180
Transfer. A long story short - we use Titan for gravity assists. Now for
those of you familiar with our mission, you know that we had gravity
assists from Venus and Earth and Jupiter to get us out to Saturn, but
within the Saturnian System, we used Titan to slingshot us around the
system. We used it to boost us out to Iapetus at one point in the
mission. We also use it to change our inclination. During close Titan
flybys, by aiming at a certain point, we can shift our inclination.

So in these Titan flybys, or these Titan 180 Transfers, we have numerous
Titans. We have Titan- Titan- Titan every orbit and each cranks up our
inclination or cranks it back down. So that was identified and it's a
great way to change our inclination, make rings and MAPS happy and have
numerous Titan flybys.

If we go to the next viewgraph, here are some of the considerations, and
I kind of already alluded to some of this. How many Titan flybys was a
consideration in a new tour. How difficult is it to redesign if we fall
off the tour? In other words, if something happens, if we miss a course
correction, if something happens and we lose deep space network
coverage - whatever - and we fall off the tour, how difficult is it to
get back on the tour?

Extend the current clockwise rotation the beginning of tour - we'll
discuss that a little bit later. Number of inclined orbits and location
during tour. In other words, in our ring orientation and MAPS. Extent of
clockwise rotation towards the magnetotail. In other words, we want to
penetrate deep into the magnetotail for the particles and fields people.
How high inclination do we get? Do we get occultations with the sun and
Earth? I'll discuss occultations a little bit later. How many actually
satellite flybys do we get and how far?

How do we avoid trapped particles? Now we know we're going to fly
through the E-Ring numerous times, but there are areas near what are
called Lagrange points that are likely to have a large amount of trapped
particles, and some could be very fairly large. In these Lagrange
regions or these horseshoe and tadpole regions, there could even be
moons trapped. Telesto is in one of these positions. It's a moon that
follows in the wake of Tethys.

We have also ground system requirements. For example, one of the
constraints on the tour design was how many consecutive 16-day orbits
can you have because we don't want to totally stress out and overwork
our ground system people. So that was a constraint as far as how much
work does it require to fly the tour. Next viewgraph.

A workshop and three teams lead by IS's, people who do work similar to
myself, evaluated eight different classes of tours. There were 17 tours
and 8 different classes. They identified some requirements and changes
that need to be seen, improvements that need to be made other than the
existing tours, and 17 tours eventually came out of this - T1 through
T17. Those were analyzed, and scientists looked at the science return
for each.

Now if you go to viewgraph seven, some of them look familiar. This is
T5. This looks not dissimilar to what we have now. I mean you can see
certain features in this that you recognize if you're familiar with our
tour. I won't go into all of the details simply because I can't just
take a laser pointer and point saying, "Well, this is an occultation
sequence. This is a 180 transfer, etc." but this actually looks like the
tour we have minus some stuff. It looks like our current tour with some
things subtracted.

The next viewgraph, though, some things don't look at all like we have
right now. I mean look at T16. The longer you stare at that thing; we
have a hard time believing it was even a real orbit. That's just kind of
bizarre. So we did analysis, trade studies on the different tours and
after a while, the PSG said, "We like from this tour. We like this from
that tour," and another tour was the output from this exercise - T18. So
we had 18 tours that we looked at and three rapidly rose to the top for
further analysis.

Next viewgraph. We have T2, which was eliminated pretty quickly because
of comparatively low science return. It just was easy to fly. The ground
system people would have liked it, but the science return was certainly
not the best that we could have hoped for. T9 - loved by MAPS. The
particles and fields people loved this. Rings loved it because we had
two 180 transfers. That gave us 51 Titan flybys. It, however, was far
too difficult to do operationally. Our ground system people would
have\-- As I said in the meeting last week actually, we would have a new
phrase in popular American slang - "Hey, man. Don't go Cassini on me
man," instead of going postal because this would have killed our ground
system people. It would have been too hard to do and that's what killed
this tour.

So we're left with T18. So at the March 1999 Project Science Group
meeting, the scientists selected T18-1 as the final tour. This was
actually the first variation of T18. There was less science returned
than on T9-1. Still quite a bit, but a little less than T9-1 as a whole.
It was still difficult to do operationally, but we decided to bite the
bullet and do it. The ground systems people had and still have their
reservations, but Bob Mitchell decided that we're JPLers. We can do
this.

Since T18-1, there have been four major revisions and 14 minor.
Actually, I'll tell you an inside story here. You'll see in these petal
plots here, and we'll describe these a little bit more in detail in a
bit, these petal plots are different colors, corresponding to different
phases of the mission. But if you look in the upper left, it says,
"T18-5 TDJ-4." Now the T18-5 means T18 tour, fifth variation. When new
changes, new tweaks, new modifications to the tour were coming out on an
almost daily basis, one of our managers said, "What do we have, the tour
de jour?" So that's what TDJ stands for. So it's T18-5 Tour De Jour
Four. We're now on TDJ14. And to be honest, the variation in the last
ten revisions, you would not see in a plot at this resolution.

So the different colors correspond to different phases of the mission.
The inner dotted circle is the orbit of Titan. The outer dotted circle
is the orbit of Iapetus. The units are in Saturn radii and the Sun is
always on the plus X-axis in the left-hand diagram. So this is a
rotating frame. The benefit to this is it shows the orientation or the
phase of each orbit. In other words, it's easy to see from this diagram
the spacecraft or Saturn/Sun angle or the phase angle. This tells us
essentially how we'll be viewing Saturn.

On the right-hand side, you see the inclination. Now this is the XZ
plane. This is in the plane of Saturn's rings. So the white phase of the
mission, the first phase of the mission comes in from the bottom because
essentially in the plane of the Solar System, and there's a 27 degree
tilt between that and Saturn's ring plane. So you see that we came in
out of the plane of the rings and then worked our way into the ring
plane. Are you with me so far?

M Yes.

Dr. Grazier Okay. I'm going a little quickly, so I don't want to\--

Trina Ray Kevin, I was going to add that one of the things that I think
people just, the numbers go by, but the scientists didn't actually pick
the final tour until we were - what - we'd been flying the spacecraft at
that point. We launched over two years ago - two years before that. We
were well into cruise when they finally picked it.

Dr. Grazier And actually one of the problems was the scientists really
kind of got obsessed on T9. You're supposed to have a tour by a certain
date and they still kind of dragged their feet because T9-1 was so
appealing to so many of the scientists, especially rings and MAPS and 51
Titan flybys. So they really, really wanted T9-1 and the project really,
really tried to tell that we can't do this. So it took us a while to
really to settle that T18 is the one we're going to fly. This is hard
enough. It's challenging enough. So I think this was a good call, good
optimization between science return and our ability to actually operate
this tour.

So let's go to the current reference tour - the next page. This is what
we have - 74 orbits and change. It says 45 Titan flybys. It's actually
45 plus the Huygens mission, eight targeted icy satellite flybys,
approximately 30 non-targeted flybys of distance less than 100,000
kilometers. Understand that each one of these is a better than Voyager
quality flyby. Numerous ring occultations and Saturn occultations. Right
now, we're in an end of a sequence that is designed for occultations
primarily. We have one Titan 180 transfer and one high-inclination
sequence at the end of the tour, and we'll go into details in a lot of
these in subsequent viewgraphs.

Interestingly enough, the last page in the first half of this talk, in
the working group, in 11/91 when actually they were debating whether or
not we were going to have a scan platform, which we don't, it was
determined that the sequencing process must start early before launch.
Well that didn't happen, but it did start early. We have a first cut on
all of the sequences done right now and have had it done for several
months.

When I say "sequence" what I mean is this is a series of commands. This
is the program that runs on the spacecraft at any given time. So their
goal was to start the sequencing as early as possible, and the tour was
supposed to be fully designed before orbit insertion, which minimizes
the impact of burnout, divorce, suicide, murder, etc. during tour.
Institutional memory is important, and we actually have lost missions -
Viking comes to mind - because of a loss of institutional memory. So we
wanted to get things done as ... so that is not an issue.

Let's go on to the next phase. Let's talk in detail about the tour. So
again, we have the petal plots and a little bit more detail on what
these show. On the left-hand side, again, we're looking down Saturn's
spin axis or from the XY plane. Again, the inner dotted circle is Titan,
the outer is Iapetus and the Sun is always on the plus X-axis. In the
right-hand side, we're in the Saturn's ring plane and the excursions and
inclination\-- The primarily thing to separate Cassini tour from
Galileo's tour.

Next viewgraph. The first phase, the white petals correspond to our
orbit insertion, and then the Huygens mission. So on June 30^th^ last
year our time, July 1^st^ UTC, we actually went into orbit. If you go to
the next page, we moved the orbit up into the ring plane. Actually, our
first orbit was 116 days long. So the first third of our first year was
spent on one long, big looping orbit. So look at the science return
we're having now, and we've got tons of information coming back. It's
almost coming down like it's coming out of a fire hose from Cassini.
Really, the first third of our first year was spent in a long distant
orbit that had no satellite flybys, no Titan. So the rest of the
mission, from a standpoint of how rapid things are going to transpire,
will be more like the last few months than it was the first few months.

If you go to viewgraph 17, you will see that I've pulled out one orbit
here. These orbits in the left-hand side start with the little green
box, which is just at the edge of the plot. The tick marks are in
one-day increments. You see different events that occur along the time
line. You see, for instance, the Titan flyby as we fly through Titan's
orbit, a Dione flyby- that's the little D by Saturn. But as you move
out, you put the spacecraft on a collision course with Titan and the H
stands for the point at which we launched the Huygens probe. That was
December 24^th^ last year.

Actually, I have to do an aside here. It's really kind of cool having a
job where you want to come in on Christmas Eve and see the telemetry
come down from the probe. There were quite a few people. Were you here,
Trina?

Trina No, I wasn't here, but boy I wanted to be here.

Dr. Grazier A lot of people here making sure probe release went off
without a glitch. People didn't have to be. We just kind of sit around
for fun. Anyway, viewgraph 18, you'll see the next orbit, again,
starting at the green. I should point out, by the way, that we put the
spacecraft on a collision course with Titan and had a serendipitous
Iapetus flyby. Iapetus is one of our main question marks. It's one of
our big targets, interesting targets, and we had a flyby of Iapetus that
was roughly 60,000 kilometers distance. So we got a fortuitous flyby
from Iapetus during the Huygens mission.

The red part of this orbit corresponds to what's called the critical
sequence. In other words, thou shalt do nothing that's not Huygens
related during this part of the mission. The second H corresponds to the
Huygens probe mission, the point at which we are receiving data from the
Huygens probe as it parachuted through the atmosphere, and then we
reached perichron, or the closest point of approach and then back out to
about the orbit of Iapetus again.

The next phase of the mission, this is the sequence where we are right
now in the orange series of orbits. These are designed for occultations.
When I say "occultation," you can essentially hear the word eclipse. We
have Saturn occultations and ring occultations. In other words, we have
two types of occultations. We have solar occultations and we have radio
science occultations. Well, strictly speaking, we have stellar
occultations as well, but this part of the mission is designed for solar
and radio science occultations.

When I say "solar occultations" what I mean is we have an instrument
that literally looks at the Sun. As Saturn passes between the spacecraft
and the Sun, you can look at what wavelengths of light are subtracted
from the spectrum and determine compositions of Saturn's atmosphere,
temperature and pressure profiles - things of that nature.

We also have radio science occultations. Radio science means that we
take the main dish and we beam a signal to Earth. This, by the way, is
the only experiment that does not take data on the spacecraft. We beam a
signal to Earth and as Saturn passes in front of it, it may get bent, or
maybe a Doppler shift in the spacecraft's range, which gives us
indication to Saturn's gravity field, helping us infer internal
structure. Alternately, we also have ring radio science occultations
where we beam a signal to Earth and as it gets intermittently clipped
off, we look at ring radial structure.

So these orbits were designed specifically for occultations. Recall I
said when I mentioned the different tours we looked at for science
return, I said that if you're familiar with the tours you can see
different pieces of our current tour in the other ones, every tour
you'll a sequence like this, an occultation sequence. It's either in the
orientation you see here in the left, or it's rotated about 45 degrees
clockwise relative to this orientation. But each of these sequences had
these occultation sequences because understanding Saturn's internal
structure; understanding ring structure is an important part of this
mission.

Next viewgraph. It gives you an idea of the kind of things we look at,
the kind of views we have during these occultations. This is what we're
doing. We're looking at Earth. We're looking at the Sun. We're looking
at ring structure and Saturn atmospheric structure.

Next viewgraph. Starting in September of this year going to mid next
year, we have these big long looping orbits, all of which are in the
plane of the rings. This is what we call a petal rotation here. We're
rotating these petals into the magnetotail. During these, we get several
icy satellite flybys, but we also, our particles and fields people, we
get them into an orientation deep into Saturn's magnetotail, a place
where they wanted to be and they've identified as one of their key
science goals.

So these are our icy satellites and magnetospheric observations, which
will be made during this part of the mission. The next viewgraph, 22,
just shows the kind of observations we get. On the left, we had Dione.
That was from our flyby last year. The right is Enceladus. That was from
our flyby two weeks ago. Is there a question? Oh, I thought I heard
somebody say something.

Viewgraph 23 just shows our 180 transfer. This is the part of the
mission where we have Titan flyby after Titan flyby after Titan flyby to
crank the orbit's inclination up, and this is good for rings and MAPS
people, the particles and fields people.

So as we crank up higher and higher on the rings, and the next
viewgraph, we'll get views like these on the right of ring structure.
There are different waves in the rings that correspond to different
types of moon-ring interaction. There are observations. We look for ring
composition, ring structure, ring compositional variations. We've seen
that the rings tend to be dustier towards the middle and in the Cassini
division, the rest of the rings are icy. Hopefully we'll get some
inspirations as to why that might be. We also will be looking for ring
spokes seen by Voyager. We haven't seen one since we've been at Saturn,
and numerous Titan flybys will be happening during this phase of the
mission as well. So we have particles and fields, Titan flybys, and ring
science will be the emphasis during this part of the mission.

Now the next phase we have the yellow sequence of orbits. This is
actually an orbit and a half. This is just kind of a preparation to get
out to Iapetus. I identified earlier that Iapetus is one of our key
sciences. So if we go to the next viewgraph, we see that as we come in
from the distant part of the yellow orbit and starting at the green, we
hit Titan. Notice we change to the red sequence, and we change
inclination. You can see in the right-hand side where the yellow orbit
is essentially equatorial. We hit Titan and our inclination varies. That
gets us out to Iapetus for our Iapetus flyby. You see that tilt is
because Iapetus has a non-zero inclination. It's got a little bit of an
inclination and we needed to change our inclination to flyby that moon.

Next viewgraph. Here we have Iapetus. Iapetus, as you can see on the
left-hand side - this is actually a Voyager image - has an interesting
aspect. Half of it is dark. It's as dark as freshly laid asphalt. Half
of it is bright as freshly fallen snow. Why this is true, why Iapetus
has this dark/light nature is actually the single oldest question
remaining in planetary science. Other questions have either been
answered, or just simply aren't as old.

I made a comment at a talk last week about scientists knowing the
light/dark nature of Iapetus in the 1800s. I was corrected by a guy
named Rodney who said, "Actually Jean-Dominique Cassini noticed this 300
years ago." So we've know for obviously a very long time that Iapetus is
half dark, half bright. Now we didn't know it to this degree as you see
in the Voyager image, but we could create what are called light curves
and measure how bright Iapetus is as a function of time. We knew it
orbited in 80 days, and as far back as Cassini we could see that it went
from bright to dark to bright to dark in the same time it takes to orbit
Saturn.

We had our mid-range flyby in January, and you can see in the upper
right we have some pretty amazing imagery. We have a crater within a
crater and a landslide within the smaller crater. To the right, you also
interestingly see a crater chain. To the very right of the image, you
see a long linear dash. It looks like where we had several impacts
happen in rapid succession, likely something like Schumacher-Levy where
something split apart by Saturn's gravity and it impacted bang, bang,
bang, bang. The person who doing the transcript is going to have fun
with that one.

Anyway, lower right. Does anyone know why I put "Discovery" there? In
the lower right, that's Discovery. It's from the movie *2001: A Space
Odyssey*. It turns out that originally, Discovery was going to go to
Iapetus because it's been known for a long time of the light/dark nature
of Iapetus. The thinking was that when we see the dark side rotate
towards us what we're seeing really is a monolith. So originally, the
Discovery in *2001* was going to go to Saturn, but later that was
changed to Jupiter.

So we have that Iapetus flyby, which is much closer than our January
1^st^ flyby. That happens in September 10, 2007. Finally, we end up in a
high inclination sequence. Again, we have multiple Titan flybys and
again, we have a period of the mission that will be good for ring
observations and they'll be good for Titan flybys and particles and
fields measurements as well.

If we go to the next viewgraph, I show on the left here moon-ring
interactions. The F-Ring is going to be really interesting as far as the
way moons interact with it and all of the dynamics of the core, the
bright core. It's doing some pretty interesting stuff. On the right we
see particles and fields imagery. You see essentially Saturn's magnetic
field, and you see, this is from I believe Mimi in the right-hand side.

...On the last page, I show our famous Voyager mosaic and our Web site,
which I'm sure you all are aware, and also the imaging Web site,
cyclops.org. I went through that really quickly didn't I? So if there
are questions, I will gladly field them at this time. I kind of blew
through that at warp drive.

Ginny Kevin, this is Ginny. I know the answer to this, but there are
folks here that may not. Why are the images now better than they were at
Voyager?

Dr. Grazier Well several reasons really. Firstly, we have a better
camera. Both the NAC and the WAC are one-mega pixel CCDs and the WAC,
the wide angle camera, is actually Voyager era hardware, but the NAC is
a much better camera, much higher resolution and we're, in general,
getting much closer to these objects. The combination of better camera
and closer flybys.

Matthew Kevin, this is Matthew over with Saturn Observation Campaign. I
realize early in the history of the development of the Cassini
spacecraft that you did try to include a scan platform on the
spacecraft, but it was deleted for budgetary reasons. At that point, was
the reaction wheels included into the design to reduce the amount of
fuel used to orient the spacecraft? Did that drive the installation of
the reaction wheels?

Dr. Grazier No, the reaction wheels for fuel saving wasn't entirely the
reason. It turns out that though reaction wheels spin the spacecraft
very slowly, they also point much more accurately than thrusters do. So
I'm sure pointing accuracy was also a consideration when the reaction
wheels were installed in the spacecraft, or when the decision was made
to put on the reaction wheels.

Matthew Thank you.

M Kevin, could go over one more time what a 180 transfer is?

Dr. Grazier I'll go back to the corresponding viewgraph.

M Then also, could you also explain briefly how reaction wheels work?
Thanks.

Dr. Grazier Let's go reverse order. The reaction wheels - Hubble calls
then gyros. They're essentially the same thing. They're this big heavy
wheel, like a gyro that when you spin this up it imparts a torque and
will essentially spin the spacecraft in the opposite direction. So we
spin these up or spin them down and these will impart a torque to turn
and point the spacecraft.

We have three in operation at any given time. They don't really
correspond to X, Y and Z-axis of the spacecraft. In fact, actually they
don't. Absolutely they don't correspond to X, Y and Z, but by spinning
them in combination, we can spin around any of the three spacecraft
axis.

Now going back to viewgraph number 23 as far as the 180 transfer, you
can see that what we have here is we have a situation where essentially
we rotate the petals up and over Saturn and we swap the orientation of
the orbit. You see that the line of nodes rotates about 135 degrees
actually. So we flip up and over and get to a high inclination by virtue
of multiple Titan flybys. You can actually see the point in the
right-hand diagram where we have multiple Titan flybys.

All of these orbits are 16-day orbits. They correspond to being in
resonance with Titan. In other words, these are an exact period of
Titan's orbit around Saturn. So we meet up with Titan again and again
and again at the same point in its orbit, and we use these multiple
flybys to increase our inclination to get to higher and higher
orientations for particles and fields and ring observations. Does that
answer your question?

M Yes. Thank you. I've got one follow-up. What powers the reaction
wheels?

Dr. Grazier Electricity. The RTGs essentially. The radioisotope thermal
electric generators generate electrical power and that drives the
reaction wheels.

Chuck Hello. Chuck Marble, NASA Solar System Ambassador from California.
A quick question for you. On the fuel capacity, I know the primary
mission was four years with a possible extended mission as long as an
additional four. Obviously, how much fuel is being used during the
primary mission will be of consideration on the extended mission. Now
that we're more than a year into it, how are we doing on fuel mileage?

Dr. Grazier We're doing fantastic on fuel mileage. We're also doing well
in power too because relating back to the last question, how much
electrical power we have also dictates whether or not we can an extended
mission because we have to be able to point the spacecraft. We have a
lot of electrical power. We have more than we predicted in the early
stages of the mission right now. So we're doing great on electrical
power, and we have quite a bit of fuel as well. So we're doing great.

As far as the extended mission, the extended four years, that depends on
the type of mission we do. If we do Titan flybys again and again and
again, that won't be as long a mission as if we do pure particles and
fields missions. But I have seen estimates ranging from four years to 13
years extended mission. Now, 13 is probably a bit long, but I've seen
estimates that we might be in business for a lot longer than the four
years extended.

Chuck That would be fantastic. Another follow-up. One of the issues
that's come to light with the Mir Space Station and the Hubble space
telescope and of course even the ISS is the need to always have a plan
on how you're finally going to get rid of your spacecraft at the end of
lifetime. Has the Cassini team given any thought on how they plan on
getting rid of Cassini at the end of the mission? Are they going to
crash it into Saturn much like Galileo was with Jupiter? Is there enough
fuel to actually do a flyby of one of the moons and send it on a deep
space mission like Voyagers and Pioneer?

Dr. Grazier Well the answer to your question - has any thought been
given to this as in "any?" Yes. Has any serious thought been given to
it? Not really. I don't believe that even with multiple flybys we can
get out of Saturnian system. I know people have actually looked at that
a little bit. I don't know how much that is. I don't think it's much,
but we've had ... even for extended mission once we've completed the
primarily mission, we'd be willing to do things that are a little more
risky - getting closer to the rings perhaps, maybe flying a little lower
in Titan's atmosphere. We'd certainly be willing to things that are
riskier in the extended mission when we've succeeded in achieving our
objectives.

But back to your question, yes, thought has been given to it, but not
serious thought. We're giving more thought to what we would do for an
extended mission because planning for that starts next year.

Chuck I don't blame you at all, but looking long-term, I was just
curious what the long-term possibilities. With RTGs running longer than
the fuel will probably last, I wondered if there was an opportunity to
continue to use it as some sort of an observational platform even when
we don't have fuel. As I recall, the Galileo decision was because they
wanted to ensure nothing could disturb the environment on Europa. Any
there any biological contamination concerns with Cassini similarly in
the Saturn system?

Dr. Grazier I think we want to avoid Titan and probably Enceladus, but
apart from that I don't think so, but we don't want to leave it in orbit
I don't think. Again, I can't say. All I can say is thought has been
given to what we do at the end, but not a lot. I mean I don't want to
think about the end of the mission yet, do you?

Chuck I understand that very much. Thank you for being with us today.

Dr. Grazier My pleasure.

Trina Ray Kevin, I had one other neat statistic that got collected at
some point in the last year regarding the fuel efficiency from the
previous question. Cassini's traveled roughly 63 million miles in its
first year in orbit. We used just a huge chunk of our fuel at Saturn
orbit insertion and so our fuel efficiency right now is a staggering
200,000 miles per gallon. In the next year, we'll be much, much better
because we'll have used much less fuel.

Then another interesting statistic we collected was how much propellant
have we saved by doing the Titan flybys that we've done in the first
year? We've only flown by Titan five or six times in this first year and
we've already saved, just by those Titan flybys, six times the amount of
fuel that we burned at SOI. So that's some interesting statistics that
we collected regarding the fuel efficiency questions - 200,000 miles per
gallon. Yes, that's pretty good.

Dr. Grazier We rock.

M Dr. Grazier, a quick question. You mentioned the Lagrange points
earlier. What do you hope to find there, and has any observation been
done at those points already?

Dr. Grazier Well when I mentioned Lagrange points, I mentioned them\--
It was in respect to the fact that they tend to trap material. For
example, the Lagrange points of Enceladus tend to have larger particles
than the remainder of the E-Ring. Enceladus orbits within the E-Ring and
there tend to be larger particles at its Lagrange points. So I mentioned
them as something we want to avoid because these could be areas where
particles are trapped, especially in the closer moons.

So have we looked there? Yes, we have. There are actually satellites at
Lagrange points, and we have observed some of these satellites. In fact,
one of the satellites we discovered is a librator like Telesto. So of
course we look at these points.

M So something similar to Trojans on Jupiter.

Dr. Grazier Similar, yes. Actually, I've got an amusing story for those
of you familiar with the Trojans. The Trojan Asteroids orbit at the
Lagrange points leading and trailing Jupiter, at 60 degrees ahead and 60
degrees behind in Jupiter's orbit. Those are places that are
gravitationally stable between three bodies so there's a large group of
asteroids there.

Well interestingly enough, my office partner at UCLA when we were in
grad school, she was doing her dissertation on whether or not there
could be Saturn co-orbiters at its Lagrange point. It turns out that
Jupiter destabilizes them and there are not. Dynamically, those regions
tend not to trap particles for long periods of time, or at least not
solar system ages. But when they were writing up the paper for
publication, they thought, "What do we call them Saturnian Trojans?
We're at UCLA. Why do we want to publicize our cross-town rivals?" So in
publication, they called them Bruins - Bruins/Trojans, the cross-town
rivalry. No one complained.

So then when I saw long librators in my simulations, we called them
Bruins also. No one complained. So if we ever find something at Saturn's
Lagrange point, it's a Bruin. I'm hearing nothing. Okay. Wasn't that
funny? I thought it was amusing.

Trina We're all laughing.

Dr. Grazier Okay.

M ...From Maui. On the slide number 29 on the left, I see there's
something right in the middle there. Can you tell me what that is?

Dr. Grazier Prometheus.

M Oh, thank you.

Dr. Grazier It turns out that one of the scientists on the imaging team,
Carl Murray from Queen Mary Westfield College in London, had predicted
these structures in the F-Ring. Do you notice above Prometheus you see a
little gash in the ring?

M Yes.

Dr. Grazier He predicted those because it turns out that the F-Ring is a
little eccentric. It's orbit is a little bit out of round. It turns out
that Prometheus is a little eccentric, a little out of round and
Professor Murray predicted that there would be these little blowouts, or
that's what I call them, in the rings. When we got there, we saw them.
One of the first things we saw were these features, and later we saw
them actually being created, which is what we see in this image.

It turns out that in Greek mythology Prometheus stole fire from the gods
and gave it to humanity. Well I guess Prometheus is a thief no matter
where because here, Prometheus is stealing ring particle material.

M Thank you.

Dr. Grazier That's one of my favorite pictures. That's why I included
it.

Jim This is Jim Paradise in Denver. Any evidence of liquid under of the
icy moons?

Dr. Grazier How do we answer this, Trina? Evidence? Yes. If you look at
it from our flyby a few months ago, I'll avoid talking about our recent
flyby. If you look at evidence from our flyby a few months ago, you saw
Enceladus with no craters. The number of craters on an object tells how
old its surface it. Not how old the object itself is, how old its
surface is. A lack of craters indicates an active body, something is
doing to resurface it. Either there's volcanism or there's venting, or
there's weather or there's erosion or something. We saw a dearth of
craters on Enceladus indicating an active body. Something is going on
there. So is there evidence? Yes.

Trina Everyone should go off to the raw image Web site and take a look
at the recent images from Enceladus and then be looking from a press
release from the project as soon as we can get one out.

Dr. Grazier That's a very good way of answering that, yes. In other
words, in big red flashing letters, "Hint."

Trina Yes. Hint: Go look at the raw image Web site and you will be
pleasantly surprised.

Jim I'm on my way.

Trina Kevin, I was wondering if you could, since you went through so
very, very quickly, I was wondering if you could spend maybe five
minutes and talk a little bit about the five disciplines and sort of the
major tours. You talked about it along the way, but I thought maybe just
rings would really like this, MAPS would really like that. That might be
a nice cohesive sort of five-minute statement that might be helpful to
put things in perspective.

Dr. Grazier Sure. Go to viewgraph 15, or one of the two viewgraphs where
you can see the entire tour with the two different petal plots. Now when
you look at the tour, you'll see obviously different orientations of the
orbit, different inclinations, some of the major axes, in other words
different sizes of the orbits. Different disciplines are interested in
different orientations and sizes and shapes of orbits for different
reasons.

Now when we came up with a tour, we decided that we had to split this
tour into different pieces. What we're going to do is we're going to
give different discipline groups to do the sequencing. So what they did
is they segmented the tour. They split it into different pieces saying,
"Okay. These orbits are inclined. We'll give them to rings or particles
and fields. This part of the orbit is a Titan flyby."

So we split it into different discipline groups. We have two orbiter
science groups - the Titan Orbiter Science Team or TOST and the
Satellite Orbiter Science Team called SOST. When we have close satellite
flybys or close Titan flybys, these teams are responsible for
determining what series of observations will be made. So different
instruments come to these meetings. They say, "We want this science."

Good example of Titan. We have the radar team. Radar wants to be pointed
obviously with our radar towards Titan. Different instruments, like the
optical remote sensing instruments, which are mounted 90 degrees
perpendicular to the dish, want to be a different attitude. So we make
trades who gets the spacecraft at what time during these meetings, and
different flybys are given to different teams based on the strength of
what science they want to perform during the flybys.

The same is true with SOST. Representatives from each of the science
teams meeting and during the flyby of Enceladus who is going to be
prime? Who's going to be observing? Who's going to be riding along? When
I say "riding along," we have, for example, four optical remote science
instruments - ISS, VIMS, CIRS and UVIS - that are all co-aligned. They
all point in the same direction. So when one's taking data, the other
three can as well if there's space on the recorder.

So trades are made - who's prime, who's going to be riding along, who's
going to wait for the next flyby or whatever. So we have two types of
orbiter science teams - TOST and SOST.

Now further, we have four other discipline teams that are called Target
Working Teams, TWTs or yes, "twits." So we have four TWTs on Cassini -
don't go there - and these TWTs are the rings TWT, the MAPS TWT, the
Saturn TWT and the cross-discipline TWT. The cross-discipline TWT is
actually the segments that don't really fall into other categories well.
Usually, they're very distant parts of the orbit, or in one case, the
most contentious part of the entire mission, which therefore everybody
wants and therefore they give it to cross-discipline to sort out.

So for example, in rings segments, the rings team would determine what
series of observations get made in this segment, and those are usually
high inclination orbits. The MAPS team also get certain orbits to
integrate or to determine what series of observations get made there.
Those also are usually high inclination orbits. The cross-discipline
team gets other pieces of orbits and again, those are usually fairly
distant parts of the orbits at apochron or the most distant part. Then
Saturn usually gets perapsis. The Saturn group usually gets the perapsis
or the perichron at the closest point of approach during an orbit and
look at, for instance, atmospheric dynamics, particles and fields in
close trapped radiation belts, some icy satellite flybys, which will get
pulled out of these of course. So those are the groups.

We also have a fifth TWT that\-- Very brief. For example, the
cross-discipline TWT had 700 days of the tour out of 1400. The SOI TWT
had two hours and 30 minutes because that was the science we did just
after orbit insertion - mostly rings and particles and fields. So we
have these different discipline groups that are given pieces of orbits
or entire orbits and they will dictate, or they will meet and weigh the
science different teams want to do and determine a timeline. Once that
timeline is determined, different teams will submit command files and
then in a phase called implementation, we see if these command files
play well together.

Eventually, after we merge these command files and work them and work
them and work them and make sure they play right, only then do they get
radiated up to the spacecraft. After they've been essentially - how do I
say this? Teams will submit their command files six or seven times over
the span between the design of their observations and the time it
actually gets radiated up to the spacecraft to make sure they play well
with all of the other observations and left room for things like
downlinks and other spacecraft events. Any questions on that?

Trina Do we have any other questions?

Sadina I have one question. This is Sadina in Berkley California. Is the
extended mission going to be open to the scientific community, or is it
going to be the same team as well?

Dr. Grazier Look how many planetary scientists are on Cassini. It is a
large fraction of the planetary scientists. But I can't answer that, and
I don't know if you can, Trina, but I suspect it's going to be the same
people who have been on Cassini.

Trina They're not going to open it up for another set of sort of
proposals. There are what are called\-- All the data from the spacecraft
is required to go into a giant archive, the Planetary Data System,
roughly one year after it's collected by the spacecraft. At that time,
any scientist can download the data for free and do whatever analysis
they'd like to do with the existing data. But in terms of planning the
extended mission, that will be the same team that's currently funded and
flying the mission.

M Dr. Grazier, another question. When you have the icy bodies like
Enceladus with the smooth surface on them, I know when we talked about
Europa it was due to the gravitational tide of Jupiter and the other
larger Galilean moons. What would account for a heat source in some of
these bodies?

Dr. Grazier Well it turns out that, I'm kind of doing the negative part
of this first. What doesn't happens is like with Io, for example, and
Europa, Enceladus really isn't close enough for major tidal heating from
Saturn. Further, to get tidal heating like Io at Jupiter, you need to
have an eccentric orbit where it gets stretched and relaxed multiple
times and generates heat.

But what seems to happen is there is some resonate forcing or resonate
pumping with one of the other moons that seems to be the answer for the
heat source. So resonant effects with other satellites seems to be what
creates the internal heat on Enceladus.

M Thank you.

Dr. Grazier Do you see what I mean by resonant?

M Yes. Thanks.

Rachel This is Rachel from Virginia. In going out and doing a lot of
public outreach with younger students, they always have two questions. I
think they're pretty simple questions for you, but their questions\--
The kids always want to know what is the current number of moons that
Saturn has.

Dr. Grazier Now, as far as I know, it's 48 because in addition to the
ones that we found on the imaging team, 12 more were found from ground
based observations a couple of months ago. But realistically, a moon the
size of Saturn or Jupiter, would you really doubt that it has hundreds.

Rachel Yes.

Dr. Grazier As an aside, we talked about the current debate in the
planetary science community about, "Well is Pluto a planet, or is it a
Kuiper Belt object, or what do we call it?" I think what the ultimate
outcome is isn't as important as actual debate. How do we define what is
a planet and what isn't a planet?

Well there's a debate looming on the horizon, that's actually not that
far on the horizon that we have to deal - where does a ring particle
stop and a moon begin?

Rachel That would be a great question to ask the kids.

Dr. Grazier Obviously, ring particles are pretty small compared to
moonlets which are pretty big. And we also have evidenced, based on
certain wakes and waves in the rings, that there are objects there that
we haven't seen yet. So there's another debate we have looming. How many
moons do we end up with? Who knows.

Rachel Their second question is always, what's the newest thing that
they've learned about the rings? They're fascinated by the rings.

Dr. Grazier The newest thing?

Rachel Yes.

Dr. Grazier Gosh, what is the newest thing? We've got some pretty cool
images of Atlas and Pan. These are two moons that orbit within the
rings. These two things are kind of Saturn shaped if you look at them up
close. They have like a spherical core, and they have a band around
their equator, which\-- I hate to describe them as looking like UFOs but
they do. The models for how they accreted or how they became to look
like that - well they look that way is one thing we're interested in
looking at.

Also, looking at the moon F-Ring interaction because the F-Ring, if you
look at some of our images on our Web site, the F-Ring has some pretty
cool stuff. That's something we've been looking at right now. I can't
say we've learned. We have seen after looking at all of the gyrations
the F-Ring does.

Rachel Is it okay if I do a follow-up question? They always ask us also
why are the rings younger than the planet?

Dr. Grazier That's actually fairly easy to answer. The rings are icy,
right? Now understand that in the outer solar system, a planetary
scientist considers ice to be a rock. It's the main component of most of
these moons. In fact, Enceladus is almost entirely ice. It's also, at
the temperature we find out here in the outer solar system, ice is as
hard as granite. So out here, it's a rock.

So if a moon collided with another one and shattered and left pieces
behind - that could have happened fairly recently from a solar system
standpoint - creating the rings. Alternately, a moon could have passed
somehow close to Saturn and was pulled apart tidally. So a moon that is
an orbit for a long time or maybe a passerby could have been smashed up
and account for the rings being much younger than the planet itself. In
fact, almost certainly the rings are young - less than 100 million
years, and that's young compared to 4.6 billion years for Saturn.

So there are multiple mechanism\-- Let me rephrase this. The most likely
mechanism for forming rings have the rings being significantly younger
than the planet itself. Because one other thing, rings, as they age,
tend to get dustier. The percentage of dust tends to increase. Now the
actual dust amount doesn't increase so much as the amount of ice
decreases. You get small particles of ice. They sublimate. It's gets
really small. They sublimate, turning from a solid to a gas on short
timeframes without becoming a liquid first, by the way.

Now impacts into the rings will tend to make ring particles smaller and
smaller, increasing sublimation, causing the icy stuff to go away. When
we look at the rings of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, we see rings of
different styles. Uranus' are very dark, very dusty. Are we seeing an
evolutionary trend, or what? We don't know, but we do see that the inner
part of Saturn's rings tend to be dustier than the outer. So there are a
lot of questions still remaining. But back to your original question,
almost certainly they're young because they are icy. Does that make
sense?

Rachel Yes. Thank you.

M Dr. Grazier, what's your favorite surprise so far?

Dr. Grazier Oh, my Lord. Not wanting to sound cryptic, but I can't say.
It goes back to what Trina said earlier about go look at the raw images.

M Other than the announcement on the Web site today.

Dr. Grazier Yes. Other than that, seeing the things we see on Titan. I
think my favorite surprise is the fact that we thought that we would
turn instruments to Titan and we have the ISS, Imaging Science Subsystem
with filters that we knew we could see through to the surface, and we
have VIMS which has bands, it could see through to the surface and we
have radar, which we knew could see to the surface. We have all of these
instruments that we thought, "We're going to figure out Titan pretty
darn quickly." We're going over there with a capable spacecraft and one
of the first things we find out is that no single instrument is going to
answer Titan's questions. It's just, in some respects, more bizarre than
we thought.

There aren't the big lakes of ethane and methane we thought would be
there. There might be some, but there certainly aren't global oceans.
There are areas of dark and light that, according to VIMS, are the same
composition. What's going on there? So I think what I like the most,
what I've enjoyed most is the fact that Titan just didn't give it up
right away. Titan is still kind of holding on to its secrets and that's
fun because it gives us more to ponder.

Trina Are there any other questions?

Ginny Kevin, this is Ginny from Atlanta. What are the odds that Cassini
is actually going to make it to an extended tour given Bush's Moon -
Mars initiative, and what's happened with the funding cut for Voyager?

Dr. Grazier I think our odds of getting to the end of mission are pretty
good because we've been budgeted for what we need to finish the mission
for four years. So the Moon=- Mars initiative I don't think would affect
our primary mission. I think it potentially could affect the extended
mission, but our end of mission, I'm pretty confident about us getting
there with no snags.

Realistically, we've got our first budget increases in ten years in the
past two years. We've been pretty much been being stable for ten years,
which essentially is a funding decrease and in the past couple of years,
we've been getting increases. So in the past couple of years, we've been
making out pretty good as far as overall budget within NASA. So things
are looking pretty good for general exploration and especially, of
course, moon and Mars.

Ginny Excellent. Thank you.

Chuck A related question. This is Chuck Marble again in California. With
that funding situation, I think it would help the public to understand
what the breakdown on a mission cost like this is just briefly and
percentage wise. Does it not cost a great deal more to build the
spacecraft, design it and get it to the planet than it does to run it?
In other words, how much does it cost to run Cassini now that it's there
compared to what it cost to get it there in the first place?

Dr. Grazier I am not the person to answer that. But what I can say is,
and this is kind of.... I'm not skirting the issue. I'll tell you up
front that I can't answer your question directly, but I can answer a
related question and that is when we've lost missions in the past, like,
for example, Mars climate orbiter, or polar lander, people, "Oh, my God.
We've lost \$125 million mission. Oh, my God. We've lost \$165 million
mission."

Well really, I think the public perception is that the large cost is
hardware and it's not. It's people time - the cost to operate the
spacecraft or design. The actual hardware is small chunk of that. So the
big spacecraft isn't the bulk of our budget. So there is a lot of people
cost involved here.

As far as what those breakdowns are, I don't know. I can tell you that
the total of Cassini-Huygens mission is \$3.3 billion. That's spread
over a couple of decades essentially. Seventeen nations are part of
that, but a rough split is there is \$700 million was for Huygens and
the remainder was for Cassini. So \$700 million was funded by the
European Space Agency.

Trina Yes, maybe some other numbers that might be helpful - the total
Kevin has already mentioned is about a little over \$3 billion, \$700
million for the Huygens probe. It was almost \$750 million for the
rocket alone for Cassini. The Air Force charges about three quarters of
a billion dollars for a Titan 4B launch. Cassini currently spends about
\$80 million a year in operations, funding all the people and all of the
equipment. Over the course of the seven-year cruise and the four-year
mission, that's about a billion dollars. Then I believe it's about a
billion dollars to build it.

Chuck That's a great breakdown. Thank you very much.

Dr. Grazier Yes, I knew Trina would be a better person to answer that
than myself because she lately has been the archivist for all things
Cassini.

Trina But currently, we're spending about \$80 million in a year. We
have 200 scientists. We have - what would you say, Kevin - about 300
people at JPL and in operations?

Dr. Grazier Two hundred and forty. I went and counted the pictures on
the wall a little while ago.

Trina There you go. Two hundred and forty people at JPL alone, 200
scientists and then each science team has a little crew of four, five,
six operations people that support the 12 science teams.

Chuck I think you gave me what I was looking for. Let me paraphrase and
make sure I'm not misquoting. It would cost roughly \$320 million to
operate a four-year extended mission on a spacecraft that costs \$3.5
billion for the total program. So it sounds like a deal to me.

Dr. Grazier Three point three billion dollars.

Chuck Three point three billion dollars, got you.

Trina Oh, yes. In fact, it would probably be cheaper because we're going
to get better. So even now, the processes get better. The team gets more
efficient. We actually can run the spacecraft with fewer people than we
could before. So by the time we get to extended mission three years from
now, we'll be even better than we are now.

Chuck It sounds like quite a bargain - \$80 million a year to keep the
\$3.3 billion mission running.

Trina Absolutely.

Dr. Grazier I would agree with that, and Trina's right about us becoming
more efficient. When we had a Jupiter flyby, I think the most important
thing about our Jupiter flyby was the ability to calibrate us, the
people because at Jupiter, we were just learning to operate the
spacecraft. I mean I literally put in a couple 100-hour weeks, sleeping
in my office on my futon. That's simply because we were ignorant on how
to operate the spacecraft, and also equally important was the fact that
our tools, our software tools were not mature.

We've now had several years to learn how to refine our processes. We've
now had several years where our tools have gotten to be pretty amazing.
We have some pretty cool tools on the spacecraft now. Let me parrot what
Trina said - we are way, way more efficient than we were even a year
ago.

Chuck Very good, and a related question, since we do have some extra
time today; I know it was planned that we would return to the Jovian
System and explore the icy moons. I recall the Prometheus missions being
quite a grand scheme for a while. Where are we at now? Are there any
plans on the drawing board for any large scale planetary explorers like
Galileo and Cassini, or is Cassini the last of the big ones?

Dr. Grazier Do you mean this week?

Chuck What's on the drawing board this week?

Dr. Grazier Well let me say that Prometheus isn't so much a mission as
it is a project. Prometheus is the nuclear power propulsion, nuclear
electric propulsion initiative of which the Jupiter Icy Moons orbiter
was supposed to the flagship or the first mission. I don't know its
status right now. It really does certainly change on a week-by-week
basis it seems.

Now there is another mission that is being run by actually a former
Cassini person who used to be three doors down. He's now at the
Southwest Research Institute in Bolder - his name is Scott Bolton - who
was approved for the Juno mission about two months ago. That Juno
mission is going to be a polar orbiter and is essentially a particles
and fields mission. So they're going to look at the Jupiter magnetic
environment.

So there is a reasonably sized mission scheduled to go to Jupiter in the
not too distant future, and a Neptune orbiter is also kind of being
toyed with essentially because people have recently been doing research
on the nature of Neptune and now there's thinking that there would be a
planet-wide ocean of liquid water on Neptune - not for sure but could
be. So Neptune's received new interest.

Chuck Very exciting. Thank you.

John Kevin, this is John Vicalo, Solar System Ambassador. We
occasionally when we're doing presentations get hit with the criticism
from a heckler on the cost of the mission. One technique we've used is
just kind of dividing the total cost by how many people are in the
United States by the number of years in the mission. Did you have any
thoughts on how to answer that answer - justifying the cost? Does
anything come to mind?

Dr. Grazier I have a bunch of answers for that because in addition to
doing a lot of outreach talks myself, for seven years until it closed, I
was a planetarium lecturer at the Griffith Observatory. In the 700 shows
I did in that time, the questions and answers for five or ten minutes
beforehand and I got the, "How dare you spend this much money, billions
of dollars when people are starving" question numerous times. So yes, I
do have my patent answer, how I would answer that.

I have a couple of them. Firstly, I ask people - here are the tricks of
the trade here. First I say, "Okay, do you think saving lives is a
worthwhile endeavor, saving human lives?" "Well, of course, of course."
Well, September will mark the anniversary of the largest natural
disaster ever to befall the United States. It was the hurricane that
wiped out Galveston, Texas in 1906. Several tens of thousands of people
perished. Well today, we track these from satellites, right? A couple of
years ago, we practically evacuated the entire State of Florida because
we saw a major hurricane advancing upon it. So we now save lives and the
technology that we have to essentially invent for the deep space
missions, it would be naïve to think it isn't applicable to Earth
orbiting satellites.

By virtue of the fact that we have to solve problems that no one else
has ever had to solve, it's naïve to also think that that couldn't be
applied in other areas of our lives, and again, satellite monitoring of
weather, communications are offshoots of that. So that's one response.

As far as our technology that comes out of these things, a great
example; one of the most hand-to-mouth examples of where our technology
has been used in something that's really, really handy is tympanic
thermometers - those ear thermometers, stick it in your ear, pull the
trigger and you get a reading. Those are a direct application of JPL
sensor technology. Our sensor technology was taken and somebody spun off
a company, and made those tympanic thermometers. I'll tell you - ER
nurses love them. You get a whining, crying baby who's in pain and can't
answer your questions and you need a temperature - click, you're done.

Also, imaging. Digital imaging, various topographies, CAT scans, PET
scans - that type of technology was an offshoot of imaging processing
for spacecraft because we're the first people who ever had to digitally
transmit images and then work with the data. So that technology is a
direct application of spacecraft technology. So you get a PET scan, CAT
scan, MRI - that's us, at least in the beginning. So we've spawned
technologies that improve and enhance our lives on a daily basis. That's
my first answer.

My second answer, and I give whatever answer I feel like depending on my
mood at the moment, is every culture, this is more of a philosophical
answer, every culture spends money on the past, the present and the
future. Now the present we have infrastructure. We build roads. We fund
our schools, etc. and things that we spend money on a day-to-day basis.
There's the past. We take care of the people who are no longer
generating income. We have Social Security and we fund Medicare and
Medicaid. You're taking care of the people who are beyond their
productive years; so we spend on the past, and the future. We spend
money, we invest for the future and certainly exploring space is an
investment in the future because again, the technology.

We are a nation of explorers. Human kind did not originate on this
continent. So no matter how far back you go, somebody was an explorer to
get here. So being an explorer is part of our blood. As a culture, any
part of the United States, any culture, somebody was an explorer who
came here. So those are my reasons for why spending this money apart
from just the drop in the bucket argument. How's that?

John Wonderful. Thank you very much.

Trina Okay. Well that sounds like that's it for today. Dr. Grazier, I'd
like to thank you very much for joining us today at the CHARM telecon.
We really appreciate you taking the time, and we don't have a topic for
next month's CHARM telecon yet. We're hoping, of course, to have some
thing on Enceladus after everybody does the press releases and that sort
of thing. That would be a really terrific topic if we can pull that off.

If not, I remember asking everybody what they wanted to hear at other
times, and sort of the two top offerings are a spacecraft overview by
the spacecraft manager, and we'd like to go back and revisit some of the
rings and magentospheric observations. So those are the things we're
working on and we'll let you know what the topic is as soon as we
have.... Everybody enjoy your month.

W Thank you, Trina. Thank you, Kevin.

M Thank you.

W Bye, everybody.

Dr. Grazier Take care, everyone. Have a good week.

W You too.