Cassini's Plasma Spectrometer Goes Offline

Officials at the American space agency announce that the plasma spectrometer instrument on the Cassini spacecraft has just been taken offline, due to a series of malfunctions affecting its operations.

At this point, there is no clear schedule to indicate when the sensitive instrument will be brought back online, but NASA officials say that their best programmers and analysts are working on figuring out the source of the damage.

Over the past few days, the instrument began producing a series of voltage shifts across Cassini's systems, and researchers quickly determined that the best course of action would be to shut down the instrument altogether. They hope that this measure will prevent further damage.

Operations were suspended on Tuesday, June 14, and engineering teams got to work on fixing the issue right away. Cassini is a rather old spacecraft, having achieved orbital insertion around Saturn on July 1, 2004. Soon, NASA will celebrate its 7th anniversary at the gas giant.

The earliest diagnostics mission managers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, came with indicate that a short circuit took place on May 1. At that time, a voltage shift was recorded, and the event could have only been caused by a short circuit.

Then, on June 11, another voltage shift occurred, this time in the opposite direction, but still indicative of another short circuit. The team says that the spacecraft was lucky, in that none of its instruments or engineering subsystem were damaged.

“Analysis of telemetry data from the spacecraft by the engineering team pointed to the Cassini plasma spectrometer instrument as the cause of the voltage shifts,” a JPL press release informs.

“The instrument has additional capacitors in the power lines for noise reduction. The concern was that one or more of these capacitors may have short-circuited, which would cause the voltage to shift and explain the observed changes,” the statement adds.

“Although the instrument was operating properly, engineers decided to turn it off as a precaution until the events could be better understood,” the release details. JPL experts say that the shutdown will not affect any other systems on Cassini.

Navigation systems are also sage, they added. “The plan is to resume normal plasma spectrometer operations after further analysis is completed to understand the cause of the issue better,” the team concludes.