Titan flyby

[mmcirvin]

If all has gone well, Cassini is still examining Titan with radar, and will start playing back its collected data to Earth around 9:40 PM eastern.

Notice this part:

12:32 p.m.........................Turn INMS/HGA to Titan ram direction
12:38 p.m.........................Begin INMS atmospheric collection
12:44 p.m.........................Titan closest approach

At closest approach, the spacecraft was passing through the tenuous outermost reaches of Titan's thick atmosphere, with the big antenna dish facing forward to provide some degree of protection. While doing so, it was directly sampling atoms and running them through an onboard mass spectrometer. Future flybys may be even closer, and besides doing pure science about the Titanian atmosphere, one purpose of this is to figure out how close Cassini can get safely.

The Huygens probe doesn't get released on this Titan pass; I think it goes on the next one around.