Carolina Martinez, JPL News Team

There will be an Enceladus news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT), Wednesday, March 26.  New results from the March 12 flyby will be presented.

For live streaming of NASA TV, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Participants in the news conference will be:

	- Hunter Waite, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio--principal investigator,   Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer
	- John Spencer, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.--co-investigator,   Composite Infrared Spectrometer
	- Larry Esposito, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.--principal investigator,   Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph

John Spencer, Cassini Scientist on the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (bio) 

Yesterday was a long day of waiting for our Composite Infrared
Spectrometer (CIRS) data from Wednesday's Enceladus flyby.  CIRS's
most important job on this encounter was to map the temperatures in
the active south polar region, to learn more about what warms the
"tiger stripe" fractures and measure the total amount of heat that
Enceladus is generating (the current estimate, based on earlier CIRS
data, is a whopping 6 GigaWatts).  Before I and others could do much
with the new data, they had to be calibrated, and calibration of CIRS
data, which is done by the CIRS team at Goddard Spaceflight Center in
Maryland, is pretty complicated.  It turned out there were some
hiccups in the calibration process, and though the team was working
as fast as they could, everything took longer than expected.

So all through the morning I was reading excited e-mails from members
of other instrument teams, enthusiastically describing their first
look at their data, without being able to contribute any news from
CIRS.  I *did* copy over some files early in the day, but when I
learned that they were only partially calibrated, I decided to wait
for the good stuff - I concentrated on getting my software ready instead.

Marcia Segura at Goddard, who did the detailed designs for these
observations, kept me posted on the progress of the work at Goddard,
and by mid-afternoon it looked like the final calibration was still a
couple of hours away.   So I broke down and took a quick-and-dirty
look at the preliminary files I'd downloaded in the morning.  And
they showed ...  well, I can't tell you, because we still need to
properly calibrate and check everything, and make sure we don't
announce any results that turn out to be wrong on closer inspection.
But I'm pretty happy with what I saw, and we (and the other
instrument teams) hope to have some cool findings to release in the
next few weeks.

Amanda Hendrix, Cassini Scientist on the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (bio)

Well everyone, this is both exciting and a relief! -- the flyby is over and we couldn't have hoped for a smoother ride! I got word last night (during dinner!) that we had a signal from Cassini, which initially meant that the spacecraft hadn't safed (always a good thing), and then the data started coming in.  Now, the downlink pass is over, the images are down, and they look wonderful!  I'm busy downloading and having a first look at the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph data (thanks to Alain and crew for getting them into the database so quickly!).
 
Thanks so much to everyone out there for your support and great questions. We have more Enceladus flybys planned for later this year -- here's hoping they all go as nicely as this one. There's a lot more to come!!
 
Cheers,
Amanda from Houston

Linda Spilker, Cassini Deputy Project Scientist

I just got the good news that the playback has ended.  Now for the fun part!   I am eagerly waiting to see what new discoveries are buried in the bits streaming back from Cassini.

All sorts of questions are running through my head.  I wonder if the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) will find more exotic hydrocarbons in the gases it samples deeper in Enceladus' geysers.  Will the magnetometer find an induced magnetic field that points to an ocean just under Enceladus' crust?  If there is a water ocean, what are the chances that life might exist in it?

As a Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) co-investigator, I am especially interested in the new thermal maps of the south polar region.  I am eager to find out if any of the hot spots that our instrument saw back in July 2005 disappeared or if any new hot spots appeared, indicating that the geysers might change locations.  Given the golden opportunity to observe Enceladus up close during an eclipse, I wonder how quickly the surface of Enceladus warms up once sunlight hits it again.  With Enceladus' fluffy surface, will it warm up faster than any other moon circling Saturn?
 
You'd think that being a veteran of icy satellite flybys this would be old hat for me by now, but each flyby is just as exciting as the one before it!

Carolina Martinez, JPL News Team

To see all of the raw images go to this Web site and click on the "latest images" icon or select Enceladus as the target: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/index.cfm

Below is a selection of different views.

Our blog team is still poring over their data but I'm sure they will check in soon. Todd will have a spacecraft checkout report and Amanda and John will fill us in on their reaction to seeing their data come in.  We will also have a post from Linda on all the questions they hope to answer from their treasure trove of goodies.