README FOR CASSINI PROXIMAL ORBIT MASS HISTORY

A spreadsheet showing Cassini's Mass History during the Proximal Orbits was created by Laura Sakamoto-Burke on 8 January 2018.  This information was derived from Todd Barber's propulsion spreadsheets that tracked biprop and monoprop usage. 

This information was requested by the Radio Science Team.

The change in mass from the beginning of proximal to the end-of-mission was approximately 2.4kgs. After some discussion, the SpaceCraft Office (SCO) believes the error is around +/- 0.5kg 

From Todd Barber on 8 January 2018,

     "Our ABSOLUTE knowledge of spacecraft mass during this period includes (likely) up to a few tens of kilograms of uncertainty which is far more than we used during this time.

     However, whatever spacecraft mass we had at the beginning of this period, the 2.4 kg change from start to end is probably known fairly well, let's say to about +/-20%.  Put another way, whatever we had for spacecraft mass at the start of the proximals (with errors mostly dominated by uncertainties in actual bipropellent usage over 20 years), we then decreased that spacecraft mass by 2.4 +/- 0.5 kg or so DURING proximals."


The original file provided to Science Planning:
Cassini_Proximal_Orbit_Mass.xlsx

The original file was converted to PDF for archive: 
Cassini_Proximal_Orbit_Mass.pdf