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Find a Node - Use these links to navigate to any of the 8 publicly accessible PDS Nodes.

This bar indicates that you are within the PDS enterprise which includes 6 science discipline nodes and 2 support nodes which are overseen by the Project Management Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Each node is led by an expert in the subject discipline, supported by an advisory group of other practitioners of that discipline, and subject to selection and approval under a regular NASA Research Announcement.

 




ISS and VIMS Searches




NOTE: The Cassini ISS and VIMS teams define the TARGET_NAME associated with an observation as the object relative to which the pointing has been defined. The practical implications of this choice are as follows:

(1) The ISS and VIMS teams never identify the target of an observation as Saturn's rings. Instead, essentially all ring observations are described by TARGET_NAME = SATURN.

(2) For close encounters with satellites, the Cassini spacecraft often uses inertial pointing. When this occurs, the ISS and VIMS teams identify the observation as TARGET_NAME = SKY, rather than specifying the name of the moon being encountered.

The Image Atlas at the PDS Imaging Node is built on the index files generated by the teams, and so will return "false negatives" in these situations.

The PDS has identified several ways to work around these potentially misleading identifications.

(1) Within the OPUS database, maintained by the PDS Rings Node the "Intended Target Name" is updated for observations of these types. Searches using the "Intended Target Name" within OPUS should yield satisfactory results.

(2) The OPUS Surface Geometry selector tab lets the user search for any body within the ISS or VIMS fields of view, regardless of whether or not it was identified as the target of the observation.