NASA Cassini: Saturn Science Tool Reactivated

NASA engineers have revived a vital science instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, bringing the 15-year-old probe back to full strength for the first time in nine months.

On Friday (March 16), engineers reactivated Cassini's plasma spectrometer, one of 12 instruments used by the spacecraft to study Saturn and its many moons, NASA officials said this week. It is designed to measure the energy and electrical charge of particles around Saturn.

The spectrometer suffered an apparent short circuit last year and was switched off in June to avoid further damage while mission managers studied the glitch.

"The investigation led to the conclusion that tin plating on electronics components had grown "whiskers,'" NASA officials explained in a mission update Monday (March 19). "The whiskers were very small, less than the diameter of a human hair, but they were big enough to contact another conducting surface and carry electrical current."