**NASA**

**June 29, 2004**

**2:30 p.m. CDT**

## Cassini 

**Overview:**

**Dr. Linda Spilker talks about Saturn's rings.**

Coordinator At this time, I\'d like to remind parties that today\'s call
is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at
this time. Thank you. Ms. Sohus, you may begin.

Anita Thank you. Linda, did we warn you that we record these calls, so
we have a transcript for people who weren\'t able to call in?

Linda No problem.

Anita Great. Linda, you did not have any visuals, did you?

Linda No. I\'ve been running around. I think you can imagine.

Anita I\'m amazed Linda actually RSVPed for today because it\'s pretty
crazy around here, pretty busy.

Linda Very exciting. I can feel the tension and the excitement both
rising at the same time.

Anita You can. The cafeteria is very crowded, too.

Linda Yes. Lots of people here visiting, yes.

Anita Yes. Is the whole science team here?

Linda I think just about. In fact, it was interesting. I\'m on the CIRS
team. One of the people who had decided not to come at the last minute
says, "I can\'t stand it. I\'m on my way."

Anita Wonderful.

Anita I have to tell you guys\-- I was down at the National History
Museum of L.A. County a few weekends ago for an event that we supported.
One of their summer class teachers told me that he has a group of fourth
or fifth graders he\'ll have for a week or two this summer. One thing he
is going to have them do is build a Cassini spacecraft. He hasn\'t
decided yet, whether it's going to be full scale or half scale. I said,
"Oh my gosh, where will you put it when you\'re done?" Well, he was
thinking about that.

Linda Yes. Maybe half scale, or they\'ll need ladders.

Anita Yes. He\'s going to have them actually think about what you want
to do and so what instrument you would need to do that, and then where
you would put in on the spacecraft. He\'s not going to let them just
kind of cookie cutter it.

Linda Okay. That\'s a good idea.

Anita Fabulous. I\'m going to go ahead and start, and I\'ll give Linda a
short introduction. Maybe Linda, you can tell them a little bit more
about yourself and how you got to where you are. But Dr. Linda Spilker
has been at JPL for a number of years. She worked on Voyager and is now
on Cassini as the deputy project scientist. Is that right?

Linda That\'s correct. Yes.

Anita She\'s going to just give us a little overview about what\'s going
on right now and field questions. So Linda, do you want to start?

Linda Okay. A little bit about my background, as Anita said, I started
out working on Voyager, and Voyager actually flew by Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus and Neptune. We had two spacecraft. I think I just, at that
point, fell in love with the rings. I've been at JPL 27 years now; the
chance to work on a mission like Cassini was really exciting. In fact, I
started with the Cassini project in 1988 before it was even funded by
Congress. Itwas funded by Congress in 1989 and then we launched in 1997.

What we\'re getting ready for now is our big Saturn orbit insertion
event that will take place tomorrow night. What we need to do is, we\'re
going too fast right now to be captured in orbit about Saturn. So what
we'll do is fly in very close to the planet; we actually fly through a
gap between Saturn's F-ring and G-ring, go through that gap, and then go
very close to the planet, getting within 20,000 kilometers of the
atmosphere at its closest point. We do a 96-minute burn, basically, to
slow the spacecraft down and be captured in orbit. That burn ends near,
just after closest approach to the planet, and then we turn our cameras
and our instruments and look down on the rings.

So we\'ll get some just spectacular images, resolutions as high as 120
meters per pixel, so we\'ll get in a single image, a 100 to 200
kilometers view of the rings. We\'ll also be taking infrared spectra and
infrared temperature measurements of the rings and ultraviolet data,
simultaneous filtered particles measurements. We have one portion of
that time, where we turn and point the ion and neutral mass spectrometer
into the direction of incoming molecules or something that have come up
off of the rings, in a sense, get a chance to sort of measure the ring
atmosphere as the direct measurement of what that composition of the
ring particles would be.

Something very important and key to the Cassini mission is, since this
is the closest pass we'll have to the planet, the magnetometer will be
measuring Saturn\'s magnetic field. The interesting puzzle there is that
the magnetic field appears to be at this point, perfectly co-aligned
with the spin axis. So the magnetic field axis and the planetary spin
axis essentially have zero offset.

So what we would like to do with Cassini is see if that really is,
indeed, a zero offset. But if we\'re getting closer, maybe we\'ll get
higher resolution on the field, what they call the "higher order
moments," not only the dipole field, but the quadripole, octapole
components of the field and see just exactly its configuration. Maybe
it's offset just a little bit, and that would make the theorists happy
with that.

Anita Linda, is that different than what Voyager found?

Linda Voyager basically saw the dipole component, and we have the
measurements basically from Pioneer and Voyager 1 and 2 about Saturn\'s
field; and that\'s where we think due to the sensitivity of those
measurements, that the spin axis and the dipole axis are essentially
co-aligned.

And then, we finish out those observations, cross once again between the
F and G ring gap and then we turn for a short time. We\'ve been looking
at the dark side of the rings - the unlit side of the rings. The sun is
shining on the south side. So we\'re flying over the north side of the
rings, cross through the ring plain, and then take a quick look at the
south side of the rings, and then lit A ring and get some really high
resolution images there. And then, we turn and we send all of those data
back to the ground.

Pete Are the times we\'ve seen ---are these Earth-received times or real
time?

Linda The times that you've seen are Earth-received time, as far as when
the burn starts and when the burns ends and so on. The burn ends like
9:12 p.m. and that\'s Pacific Daylight Time, and that\'s Earth-received
time.

Anita When is the occultation in all of that? When are we behind Saturn
and unable to communicate with Earth?

Linda We\'re behind the rings, basically, through part of the burn, and
we\'ll be getting a signal, but it\'s just going to be essentially a
single tone that will let us know how the burn is going. And then, once
we turn off to look at the rings, we\'re going to be in occultation from
the Earth behind the planet. But we\'re turning the high-gain antenna
away from the Earth and everything, anyway, so we wouldn\'t have a
chance to---or with the low-gain, so we'll be behind during the science
observations and then come out during that science observation period.

Jane We have a graphic on the front of the Saturn web page that was
added last night, that shows Saturn from Earth, and it has all of the
times in Pacific Daylight Time of all of these events for those of you
who haven\'t checked it out lately.

Anita I think I sent that out on the e-mail, too.

W That\'s on the Cassini page?

Linda Yes. It\'s on the front of the Cassini page. So the spacecraft
task is behind ring and planet 9:54 to 10:44 Pacific Daylight Time.

Anita Do we expect to see a signal in at 10:44?

Linda Once we turn and start to downlink the data, we should get a
signal back.

Anita So we won\'t necessarily be turned properly as we come out of
occultation.

Linda Yes. ...we have to turn and safely cross through the ring plane,
and so there\'s a series of events that we have to do. I don\'t have the
time---do you have the time when the playback starts? I think it
actually starts around midnight.

Jane Yes. The playback starts at exactly at midnight and, again, there
is a table of events on the Cassini Web site under Cassini@Saturn and
it\'s under "Saturn Arrival." There\'s a short version that\'s on the
page, and then there are two PDF documents that you can download.

Anita Linda, will you be making a stab at telling us what the rings are
made of by Thursday morning?

Linda When the pictures come back? I can tell you what we know about the
rings, and I can even speculate about what I think we\'ll see. That
Saturn\'s rings are made of particles that range in size from dust
grains to houses, or even like iceberg sized particles. They're made
primarily of water ice with a small, 99% water ice, a small amount of a
contaminant that we hope with Cassini to figure out, is some kind of
carbon compound or a silicate or just what kind of material is there.

The rings themselves are actually very, very thin; they\'re only about
100 meters thick. In some places like the C ring, maybe only as thin as
ten meters, which is very thin compared to their radial expanse for the
rings. We're flying over and getting really high resolution pictures of
the unlit side of the rings, and not much sunlight gets through the B
ring and the A ring, so it\'ll be interesting to try.

I think what we'll see is a lot of radial structure, the
record-groove-like structure that we see in the Voyager images. I think
in the high-resolution images, we\'ll see even more of that, that might
be spaced out a bit more, but see more of that radial structure. We\'re
going pass the part of the Cassini division and also crossing across the
Encke Gap and the Keeler Gap in the A ring, and we may see if there are
any kind of---we know that there\'s a moonlit Pan in the Encke Gap. Pan
creates wakes or kind of wavy edges after it has gone by a place,
recently a place in the ring. So, we\'ll be looking for wavy edges on
both sides of the Encke Gap.

The Keeler Gap, we haven\'t found a moon in there yet. It\'s a
possibility that that\'s what's creating a gap. We know if the moon is
big enough, it swept up the ring particles and created a gap and so,
we\'ll be looking downstream in the mission and also looking for wavy
edges on that gap as we get the images back from the Saturn orbit
insertion.

So I\'m thinking we\'ll see this kind of ring structures might look like
little bright strands in the pictures. Then when we look at the lit side
of the A ring, we'll definitely note the sunlight shining on the
particles and reflecting back; have a chance to see a lot of the
structure in the A ring as well.

Tibi Linda, would you be looking into the optical depth to get a little
bit more information on the A ring because, it\'s one of the darkest and
it's kind of hard to look into what is in there?

Linda Yes. The best way to get the optical depth of the rings is to
use---what we'll do a bit later in the tour is stellar occultation
measurements. We measure, as the star passes behind the ring, how much
the starlight is attenuated or how much the rings absorb the starlight;
and then that gives us a direct measure of the optical depth. It\'s
harder to get that quantity out just with pictures.

Anita You haven\'t been seeing spokes. Is that true?

Linda That\'s true. That\'s true, which is very interesting, and people
have been asking, "Why no spokes?" The main difference between the
Voyager's flybys, where we did see spokes, and Cassini, is a sun angle
with respect to the rings. That\'s the angle between---right now, the
sun is about 25 degrees below Saturn's equatorial plane; the rings are
almost about as open as they can be. In the Voyager days, the rings were
open anywhere from only two to four degrees. So maybe it has something
to do with that sun angle.

The theory for the spokes is that the particles go into Saturn's shadow.
While they are in the shadow, they are electrostatically charged up, and
so that charge repels them above the rings a little bit. Then they come
out of the shadow, and we see the spokes and see the spokes, especially
very pronounced, obvious spokes in the dawn section of the rings. By the
time they've rotated around in the afternoon, they\'ve pretty much, we
think, the particles have discharged by the solar photons and the ring
particles fall back into the rings.

Perhaps it's that with the sun angle so high that in the B ring, where
we saw the spokes last time, maybe the ring particles aren't spending
enough time in the shadow to get charged up; or maybe there\'s some
other piece to the puzzle, which is the most likely that we just don\'t
quite understand. So maybe as the mission goes on, as the rings continue
to close with respect to the sun, maybe at some point, the spokes will
start to appear again, although we\'ll keep looking. Maybe just for some
reason, they are very, very faint right now and we just haven\'t had a
chance to see them. Although, I think, by this point in the Voyager
mission, we had noticed the spokes.

Tibi ... magnetic field of---that have something to do also with all the
spokes, do you think maybe those particles sort of have an item
component in some kind of magnetic field changes a little bit will
produce some of those, too?

Linda The magnetic field is what produces the electrons and protons
right on the magnetic field lines and they may be responsible for
helping to charge up the particles. Probably the magnetic field hasn\'t
changed too much. It has probably been pretty steady. But it will be
interesting to keep looking for the spokes and see just when they appear
again.

Anita It might be that as the spacecraft changes its orbital plane, that
you might see them?

Linda That might help as we go to a slightly different phase angle.
Although, I think Voyager saw them over a range of phase angles, but
certainly, we'll look at various orientations of the spacecraft. Maybe
that has something to do with it as well. That\'s a possibility.

Anita Will we get the infrared data and other data on Wednesday night,
Thursday morning, as well?

Linda Yes. All of the data will come back at the same time. It\'s the
most straightforward to produce - to do something with the images. It
will probably take a day or two to look at the other data sets and
calibrate them and produce some useful data. It will take just a bit
longer to do that. That was our experience with Phoebe as well; we have
the pictures come back right away, and then it was several more days
until we had information from the other remote-sensing instruments.

Tibi You say you\'re going to go into the Encke and Keeler gaps. What
about the Maxwell Gap?

Linda Yes. Where we start taking the pictures, it's in the outer part of
the C ring. It was really hard. We couldn\'t get all of the rings in the
amount of time that we had. So we\'re just going to go a little piece of
the outer C ring, part of the B ring, then jump across most of the B
ring, try and get across the Cassini division and across most of the A
ring. So we really had to carefully pick and choose in the time we had,
where we want it to look.

Pete My question is, why are there thousands of rings?

Linda That\'s a really good question. When you look at the images,
especially coming back from Voyager, it looks almost like the grooves on
a phonograph record; you just see what looks like thousands of
individual ringlets. We know that some of that structure is caused by
gravitational interactions with Saturn's small moons, like Pandora and
Prometheus, and Janus, and Epimetheus.

When you have a resonance situation where, for instance, say, the moon
goes around once and you find a place in the rings where the ring
particles go around exactly two times for that one orbit of the moon and
then what happens is that the rings actually give energy to the moon.
The moon is actually moving slightly further away, but very, very
slowly, and you create something called "a spiral density wave."

It looks modeled the same physics that works for spiral galaxies, also
works for these spiral density waves. So we know some of that structure
that radial structures, produced by these resonances of spiral density
waves and bending waves, but much of it, we\'re not sure what the source
of the structure would be. So that\'s a puzzle that Cassini hopes to be
able to solve.

Pete Do you see anything that\'s really disk-like amongst the rings or
at the best resolutions, are they all resolved to a ring?

Linda It\'s interesting when you look at something like, say, the B
ring, there really aren\'t any empty spaces in there in between those
ringlets. It\'s sort of that there\'s more material, and then a little
bit less, and then more material, a little bit less; and that\'s what
gives that apparent structure of bright and dark ringlets in the ring.
But there\'s really no free space, if you will, in between the rings;
there\'s just a little bit less material, perhaps, in between those
individual, brighter features in the ring. Did that answer your
question?

Anita Yes. Linda, one thing I was thinking about is, there have been a
number of new satellites discovered at Saturn from Earth-based
telescopes; and you expect, of course, to find more satellites of
Saturn. But will those be in the rings? Where are the ones that have
been discovered from Earth based observations? Are they in the rings or
where would you expect to find other new satellites in relation to the
rings?

Linda When Cassini was launched, Saturn had 18 satellites. Since
Cassini\'s launch, we\'ve discovered 13 more. Those satellites have all
been far from the planet in the region around Phoebe or actually farther
from Saturn than Phoebe, in what we call "the class of irregular
satellites," in that they have orbits that can be retrograde; they\'re
moving backwards relative to the rest of the moons or inclined or
eccentric.

It\'s really hard from the Earth, even with the Hubble telescope, to
look in very close to the rings because the rings are bright, and it's
very hard to see new satellites in that region. So that\'s something
that Cassini will be ideally suited to do to look for new ring moons,
essentially tiny satellites, orbiting in very close to the ring.

We know that a pair of them - Prometheus and Pandora\--shepard, the F
ring. There\'s another pair - Janus and Epimetheus\--that almost share
an identical orbit and periodically, actually, trade places as they go
around Saturn. We know the tiny moon, Atlas, that\'s just outside the
outer edge of the A ring and, of course, Pan inside the Encke Gap.

Pete Have you figured out the nomenclature of what you\'ll call
satellites, whether they\'re moon or ring particles? Have you come up
with how to classify those?

Linda Yes. That\'s a really good question. It\'s kind of a fun question,
actually. When is it a ring particle and when is it a moon? And pretty
much, if it\'s an object that you can recover and get an orbit for it,
in other words, you can image with the ring particles sort of packed
shoulder-to-shoulder, it would be really hard to identify the same ring
particle even one orbit later, because there are just so many neighbors
around it.

So if it\'s a moon, let's say, outside the ring and you can recover it
and get an orbit, and that orbit, you can calculate its orbit for the
four years of the tour, then you'd call it a moon and you give it a
name. The way they classify newly discovered satellites is, they put the
year first. So it will be---if it's this year, 2004, then S for Saturn,
and then they just start numbering them, 01, 02, 03, 04 and so on. And
then, later, the International Astronomical Union committee convenes and
they actually pick names for the moons. But initially, it will be like
2004 S1, and if it's discovered a year later, 2005 and it could be
another S1 with a name like that. But if you get an orbit, I call it a
moon. And if you can\'t recover it because there are so many particles
around the rings, then you just would have to leave it as a ring
particle.

Pete My other question has to do with the composition of the rings and
the planets around there. Since the rings are so bright and composed of
so much water, do you think there\'s a physical mechanism that---and the
other point is, say, Iapetus is picking up, perhaps, an organic material
on its leading side, do you think there\'s a mechanism that\'s doing
separation of the material?

Linda The materials that were used to form Saturn, going back to this
disk material left from the Sun, Saturn is primarily hydrogen with some
helium, and then little bits of other things, like methane or ammonia
and so on. The satellites are primarily ice with a rocky component. They
may be 30% to 50%, rock, perhaps in their interiors.

Pete Because the rings are so much water, yet you have some of the moons
which have what appears to organic surfaces, do you think there\'s
something that\'s causing a segregation of materials in the orbits?

Linda Not necessarily. The source of Iapetus is dark material. It's a
very interesting one. We don\'t know, for instance, if it's a material
that has come from outside Iapetus and painted or coated its surface, or
if some process partially melted the interior of Iapetus; maybe what
we\'re seeing is sort of like a volcanic outflow of material. Probably,
each of these bodies has a rocky or heavier component, maybe with some
carbon-bearing materials in them. It's just a question of what processes
went on that produced its surface.

Enceladus has a very bright surface. What that's telling us is that the
surface is probably relatively young. We know that Enceladus is the
source of the E ring, and so material is coming off of Enceladus - very
small particles in creating the E ring. Some of the other satellites
look much older and have a darker component to their surface, maybe not
as dark as Iapetus; but Phoebe, of course, is very, very dark, as well.

So, in the case of Phoebe, it looks like there may be some material
actually coating the surface. You can see places where impacts have gone
through and produced craters. And in some of the smaller craters, the
middle of the crater is very bright, that you've punched through the
dark material into the brighter material underneath.

So it\'s probably not a segregation process on material necessarily
throughout the moons, but maybe each one has its own little story to
tell of what its past history has been like and why its surface looks as
it does today.

Anita Linda, you said that the SOI is the closest we get to the rings,
so I know that can be very exciting for you. What other portions of the
tour are going to be exciting for you, specifically with the rings?

Linda The best time to view the rings are in orbits that are not in
Saturn\'s equatorial plane. So, of course, my favorite set of orbits are
those where we are lifted up out of Saturn\'s equatorial plane. Right
after SOI, we go into a series of orbits that are designed to set up to
drop off the Huygens probe. The rings are pretty close in those orbits
that are near equatorial. But once we\'ve dropped off the probe, then we
have a series of orbits, where we raise up the inclination and we get a
nice series of radio occultations from the earth, there\'ll be some
stellar occultations and another chance to observe the rings.

I think my very favorite part of the tour is going to be in that last
nine months, where we are raising the inclination of the orbit to the
highest that it will be through the whole tour, and almost having a
polar orbit, not quite---we\'re getting up to, I think, 72 degrees or
something and actually looking down on the ring, and having a chance to
see them kind of opened up in their full glory. I think, for me, that
will be the most exciting part of the four-year tour.

Jane We actually now have a page we just added yesterday to the Cassini
web site that has highlights of the Saturn tour. It shows each of the
sequences and it shows the plots of exactly what Linda just mentioned,
so that you can see what the rotation looks like for each of these kind
of sequences. That\'s under the Cassini@Saturn part of the web site.

Anita Is there an animation of that or just the stills?

Linda I think it\'s just stills. They're the petal plots, but they\'re
sequence-by-sequence, color-coded.

Anita I always thought it would be great\--here's an idea for the
planetarium and science centers online\--is to do something like a
physical model of the orbital tour, like wires or something so that you
could actually see the plane changes. It would probably look like a
rat's nest if you did all 75 orbits, though.

Linda Yes. You probably wouldn\'t have to have 75 orbits because it
turns out especially toward the end of the tour, we might do the same
orbit five or six times. We changed the orbit orientation with Titan
flybys. Toward the end of the tour, the Titan flybys are further apart,
so you wouldn\'t have to go up to 75 wires. It would be close, not quite
that far.

Tibi Have the Encke twist still shown up? Kinky Encke, yes.

Linda Yes, kinky Encke - the discontinuous ringlet that\'s inside the
Encke Gap that\'s sort of twisted and broken up into pieces, yes, we\'ve
had a chance to see that in the pictures.

That\'s inside the Encke Gap, the moonlet Pan that's inside the gap, and
it seems to be controlling a narrow ringlet inside the gap that we saw
at the Voyager data, and we can sort of see hints of that again.

The F ring is also there and it's got kinks and braids and lumps and
what they called "clumps," actually, clumps in the F ring. For some
reason, particles appear to kind of clump together for a bit, and then
spread apart again. We\'ve been seeing those also.

Anita Does it surprise you that they\'re still there?

Linda No. I think that Pandora and Prometheus somehow have a hand in
generating those clumps. So I think we\'ll just keep seeing them, and
then trying to figure out what creates them and how long they last. With
Voyager, we really just got a snapshot with the flybys and don\'t have a
very good idea about how these things form, how long they last, and how
they go away, basically.

W Now, I understand we crossed the bow shock a couple of days ago and
you were saying that the magnetic field looks like it was still on, so
presumably, we\'ve come inside the magnetopause. Was that a single cross
thing or did it pass several times?

Linda Yes. As of toward the end of the day yesterday, I think we\'ve had
at least eight crossings, and that has really more to do with the solar
wind than anything else. As the solar wind pressure changes, you can
imagine this bubble expanding and contracting. The solar wind blows
harder, the bubble contracts; the solar wind lightens up, it expands.
So, in a sense, Cassini, as you can imagine, is moving in a straight
line, but this bow shock is moving back and forth across the Cassini
spacecraft. So we\'ve actually, I think, had at least eight bow shock
crossings.

They had, as part of press conference today, sort of an audio that they
made of the bow shock crossings. You can hear basically the solar wind
is pretty quiet and you hit the shock and you just hear this increasing
noise and then a decrease, and then the next crossing and so on.

W Yes, but there\'s a bow shock crossing and there\'s also an inner
magnetopause crossing, where it gets quiet again.

Linda I don\'t know if we have crossed and stayed inside the
magnetopause; we may have by now. In fact, I have a science meeting here
shortly, and I\'m sure I will find out more details there.

Anita Will Cassini be going in and out of the magnetosphere during its
tour?

Linda Quite possibly, yes, it will, especially when the orbit petal is
aligned toward the noon or dayside. That's where the magnetospheres
compress the most, sort of in the front there at the nose. In fact, the
solar wind may blow hard enough at times that Titan itself may actually
be outside of Saturn's magnetosphere at times. So we\'ll be interested
as we have our 45 flybys of Titan to see Titan both inside and outside
the magnetosphere and look at the changes that happen in the surrounding
environment around Titan.

Pete If you could see the rings with high enough resolution, do you
think you'd see the material in there all being orderly, like a freeway,
or do you think there\'ll be some jostling, say, when a shepherding moon
goes around?

Linda I think there\'s probably even in the places where you don\'t have
density in bending waves, I think there\'s probably periodic collisions
that happen. The models that we have the ring particles range from kind
of hard icy spheres, like an ice cube, all the way to very floppy
snowballs, very loosely-packed material. The answer is probably
somewhere in between. You might have kind of an icy core, covered with
kind of like a regolith or like maybe fluffy snow on the outside of the
ring particles.

But I think we have a lot of collisions going on, especially in a dense
ring like the B ring. I can almost picture it like the freeway in Los
Angeles at rush hour, only less orderly.

Anita Perfect, great image. No exit lanes.

Linda No exit lanes. That\'s right.

Tibi You must feel like one of the most lucky women in the world.

Linda Yes. It was a wonderful time to be here. Like I said, I've been on
Cassini for 16 years, so it has been a long wait, and I\'m sure it will
be worth it.

Tibi And it pays off for all the science you took in college and high
school and everything.

Linda Yes. I'm putting a lot of good things to good use.

M For those of us who have a terrible cable system up here and can\'t
get NASA TV, have you attempted to see if C-SPAN will be carrying this?
They will occasionally pick up some science shows.

Linda I don\'t know what the plan is. As the pictures come down, we hope
to display them but, you're right; it will be on NASA TV.

Tibi I think CNN is going to carry that. I talked to a guy in CNN, and
CNN is going to be doing all the stuff tomorrow night. So watch for CNN.

Anita I will look that up---I will ask our media folks if they know.
Because I know for MER, that C-SPAN did archive the press conferences
online and so I\'ll try to find that out for you and send out a notice
to everybody.

Jane I\'ll do the same for those people who are part of the Saturn
observation campaign. Anything Anita sends out, I copy it and send it
out.

Anita And I copy what Jane sends out.

Jane I do have a bit of image news for everybody who\'s on the line. I
know a lot of the museum folks have been wanting to know when we\'re
going to start seeing lots and lots and lots of pictures. We\'ve been
working really hard here with our web people, trying to figure where we
can put them all, where we can store all of these images and we\'re just
about ready to have that placed. We\'re hoping to have a beta image site
with up to hundreds of daily images. It may be up as soon as tomorrow,
but it may not be until the next day.

But for those people who have been patient, I don\'t think anybody in
this group are the ones that complain to us everyday about where are the
images. They\'re coming and I just want to check with my boss and make
sure I could announce that. But we\'re getting really close to---it\'s
just down to what information we\'re going to include with the images,
that preserves enough information, so that scientists kind of get to do
their thing first.

But there will be JPEG images, up to 500 a day. We\'re going to go back
all the way into May and put up all of those, so that you can actually
sit there and look through several hundreds of images and watch as
Cassini gets closer and closer.

Anita And these are raw images just like other missions. All of the
Saturn images are going to be - all of the Cassini images - are going to
be on the public Web site. We will not have a private site like we did
for Mars because we don\'t expect the Internet traffic, frankly, to be
quite as high as it was for Mars. That was one of the big reasons that
we had a private site for museums for the images for Mars, so that you
could always get access, even though the public traffic might be slowing
down or taking down the public site. We don\'t think that\'s going to be
an issue with Cassini.

Linda Yes. I would just caution that we haven\'t officially released
news about that web site yet, and I know we need to keep that a little
bit quiet.

Just to let you know that it hasn\'t been officially completed decided
and approved and all those good things, so we have to be careful not to
release that and get public expectations high when we don\'t follow
through.

Anita But all of the publicly released images will be both on the
saturn.jpl.nasa.gov site, the photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov site, and
probably a few others. Those are the media released images \--the color
images, anything that has been released at a press conference would be
on photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov and on the Saturn site for sure.

Linda Let\'s see. If there are no more questions for me, I have a
meeting to go to. Is that okay?

Tibi Yes. Thank you, Linda... Good luck to you

Linda Great. Thank you very much. Okay. Bye-bye.

Anita Okay. There was a question about if we were going to provide these
images as slides or on CDs

Tibi The best images and ... that particular information like, for
example, if we\'re looking at the A rings, when I get the best image of
the A ring or whatever then put in the slides or CDs. So I do a lot of
public outreach for JPL through the Solar System Ambassador Program and
I\'m really interested in doing some presentations. I can download
another frame and put it on CDs for myself, but then for public
distribution.

Anita I don't know. Let's throw that one back to Jane because I\'m not
part of the Cassini team and definitely have no budget.

W We definitely don\'t have any budget right now for something like
that. But that isn\'t to say that there might not be a CD at some point
with images on it, but it would probably be next year.

Tibi Okay. But I think we can also download it and put it, save it in
that computer\...

W Sure, of course.

Tibi Then, we can upload it with lesson plans for you guys in the Web
site, maybe, maybe other people can use it.

Anita That would be great.

Tibi Okay. I have to go back to my office, too. I have a mega project,
so I thank you for the opportunity.

Anita Thanks for joining us.

W What about live NASA TV tonight?

W There's live shots today with Jack Dawson for those of you who want to
capture that and then the commentary tomorrow starts, Jane, at what -
6:30, I believe.

Jane 6:30 pm. Pacific Time. That\'s the NASA TV coverage.

Anita You all need to bookmark the NASA TV breaking news schedule.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Breaking.html I\'ve
actually made that my home page with my browser, so that I can always
remind myself to look and see what\'s coming up to remind all of you
guys.

W Okay. That\'s okay for us to give out? I want to be sure the teachers
know where they can get information that may not be the museum page.

Anita Yes. That breaking news page for NASA TV is absolutely public.

W Okay. Cool.

W Yes. In fact, here---let's see what's on it right now.

Anita Always with the caveat and it may get pre-empted by something else
that NASA wants to do. But I don\'t think they're going to pre-empt this
one. Is that Pat?

Pat Yes.

Anita We had so much fun with your portable planetarium that was here
last week.

Pat Wasn't that a hoot? That's just the prototype. Our new dome should
be here within the next week or two. We\'ll have much better air that
lets people in and out without losing air, and the projector roller is,
that\'s still just the prototype, too. So we\'re really excited about
it. We\'ll have our Saturn show put to the small dome pretty soon.

Anita Fabulous.

Pat Yes. The Saturn show has been running for a couple of weeks now -
Ring Worlds, and it's really very popular, even more popular than Pink
Floyd, I want you to know.

W Oh no.

Pat The Pink Floyd Show is fabulous, however. We have the entire *Dark
Side of the Moon*. This is the late night show. There's a whole *Dark
Side of the Moon*, the CD set to video and it is way cool. But I was
just glad to know that Mars and Saturn actually draw more people.

Anita I hope that\'s because we\'re able to make the news available to
everybody quickly. I think it\'s more fun to learn about Saturn when
it\'s happening.

Everybody have a wonderful Cassini party\... It\'s going to be the start
of a really wonderful and best exploration.

We'll talk to you all June 13. I\'m going cancel skip next week\'s
telecon because it\'s the day after the 4^th^ of July, and I think a lot
of people will be out.

Jane By then, we\'ll for sure have the images---the big raw image issue
all resolved, so maybe we can get an imaging person and tie it in with
any other imaging people you if want to have an image fest.

Anita Great. Then on the 20^th^, we have for the Mars telecon on the
20^th^, we have Larry Soderblom from USGS, who has agreed to call in, so
that should be a lot of fun. Larry is one of my very favorite people on
the science team, so something to forward to.