Cassini flies by Phoebe (and its radar works!)

The main link is to the AP story, here's the L.A. Times (reg required) story.

[AP] The plutonium-powered spacecraft, which is carrying 12 science instruments and a probe, came within about 1,285 miles of the dark moon Phoebe on Friday, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

The $3.3 billion spacecraft pointed its instruments at the moon, then turned to point its antenna toward Earth. Its data reached NASA's Deep Space Network on Saturday morning.

And I have it on good authority that the on-board radar works. The instrument works, the data came back, and were analyzed successfully.

The remote sensing instruments can calculate measurements from a great distance. This set includes both optical and microwave sensing instruments including cameras, spectrometers, radar and radio. [Read More]

As shown by the above list of instrumens, there's more than radar aboard... I just get radar-related news firsthand. When I attended the Radar Section Christmas party last December, the Section Manager had this to say about 2004: "Charles Elachi [JPL Director] says there are three priorities for JPL in 2004: MER, MER, and Cassini." So the first two went swimmingly, and we're onto the third.

The hardware was built before the Oct 1997 launch, so congratulations are going out to people for work done close to a decade ago. (Talk about delayed gratification!)

The Cassini website at JPL