SESDA II Visits Saturn
September 14, 2010
SESDA II staff were involved in yet another exciting discovery by the Cassini spacecraft's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). A special flyby of Saturn's moon, Mimas, revealed an unexpected thermal heating pattern that scientists are scrambling to explain. Staff participated in the find through their creation and uplink of CIRS command sequences for the observation as well as their processing and calibration of the returned science data which was used by the science team to create the map. A visible image of the moon and the "pacman-shaped" thermal pattern composed from the flyby data was featured on the Cassini Mission's Web site.
