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by antimagic 4464 days ago
Well, being pedantic for a moment, the problem never was fixed. The flightpath of Cassini was simply altered so that there was negligeable Doppler shift of the radio signal from Huygens, meaning that the inability to handle a Doppler shift.

Happily enough this was possible to do without using too much fuel, and indeed Cassini had more fuel available than planned, as the original launch and early course corrections had been so precise that fuel planned for course correction burns was available for other uses. One of the consequences of all of this is that Cassini is still operational today, more than 5 years passed the planned end of it's mission.

1 comments

"Well, being pedantic for a moment, the problem never was fixed."

But a work round was found. And I have a really good example for teaching resolving vectors...