Spacecraft and Instrumentation

Abstract

The new scientific work in this thesis stems from data gathered and returned to Earth by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. Onboard the spacecraft is a suite of in situ instruments making field, particle and wave measurements for studying dust, plasma and magnetic fields around Saturn. There are also suites of optical remote sensing instruments (e.g. UV and infrared imaging) for studying Saturn’s aurora and microwave remote sensing instruments (e.g. radar) for mapping Saturn’s atmosphere and its moons’ surfaces. Figure 3.1 shows where each of the twelve instruments are located on the spacecraft. The data presented and interpreted in these studies are principally from Cassini’s Fluxgate Magnetometer (MAG) (Dougherty et al. 2004) with supporting data from the Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) (Gurnett et al. 2004) and Ion Mass Spectrometer (IMS) (Young et al. 2004). In this chapter, we will begin with a brief overview of the mission and then describe the instruments used.

This chapter is an enhanced version of a chapter from and original PhD thesis which is available Open Access from the repository https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/ of Imperial College London. The original chapter was distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, duplication, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this book or parts of it. The Creative Commence license does not apply to this enhanced chapter, but only to the original chapter of the thesis.