PASADENA, CA – The Cassini plasma spectrometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft at Saturn has resumed operations.

Mission managers received confirmation on Mar. 16 that it was turned on; they plan to monitor the instrument for unusual behavior.

Last June, short circuits led to unexpected voltage shifts on the spacecraft. As a precaution, mission managers turned off the CAPS instrument while engineers investigated.

The investigation showed that tin plating on electronics components had grown "whiskers." The whiskers were less than the diameter of a human hair, but they were big enough to contact another conducting surface and carry electrical current.