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In the eve of one of the most anticipated space events we’ve had for a while, I was reading on some of the tech features of the Cassini spacecraft (very close now at entering orbit around Saturn tommorow around 10:00am AEST).

Cassini uses two solid state recorders, 2 gig each (solid state memory is now a standard for all spacecraft as there are no moving parts). The flight computers use the ‘Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC) chips, which are radiation hardened (so AMD and Intel miss out again in dominating space) and all the software for the command and data subsystem is written in Ada (why didn’t they use LotusScript ?
On approach, Cassini will have to use it’s High-gain anntenna dish as a shield from ring particles, go between a gap in the F and G rings, and burn it’s engines for 96 mins in order to slow down enough to enter orbit… I wish you luck Cassini; coverage will begin tommorow morning from NASA TV, so don’t miss this one out!

Update:NASA TV coverage begins at July 1st, 10:30 am Melbourne time!

After upgrading to the latest Trend-micro PC-Cillin 2004 anti-virus and internet security product, the internet connection stopped working. Naturally, pc-cillin’s built-in firewall was the culprit (I’m using the Sygate firewall) so it was just a matter of turning the pc-cilling firewall off (which was a bit tricky too). Do we now have too many firewalls in place for the average home user? Let’s see; there’s the MS Windows built-in FW, specific FW packages like Sygate, ZoneAlarm, Norton’s etc, firewalls on routers and ADSL modems, and now even NVidia is putting a hardware FW in their latest nForce3 chipset. Clearly, you only need one firewall (OK, maybe two…) so when things stop working, do we have one too many?

Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne’s historic trip to the outer edges of our atmoshere (100km or so) went well. Financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, I feel even more a part of this flight into space since I’ve contributed (to a small extent) to the funding. You see, Paul Allen poured more than $20 million into this (he was always a space buff) so by buying a copy of Windows (or MS product) you are virtually helping him out. Now, can I get a seat in the next flight please? I do promise to register my MS-DOS 2.0 copy I bought in 1984!

The Cassini spacecraft has taken some incredible shots of Saturn’s mysterious moon Phoebe, during it’s flyby over the weekend. It’s good to see that Cassini’s cameras and other instruments are still working as expected after 7 years in the harsh vacum of space. Only 16 days to go now until showtime.

A rare upcoming astronomical event, a Transit of Venus will take place on Tuesday 8th June (only 5 transits of Venus have been observed in recorded history). For Melbourne, it will begin at 3:08pm but we won’t get to see the whole transit as the sun will set just after 5:00 pm. Transits of Venus come in pairs (next one will be on 7 June 2012) and the one after that will be on 2117. Historically, the transit has been important for measuring the distance to the sun, and that’s exactly what Captain Cook was there to do in 1769 (finding Oz was just a side effect!)

I’ll be with the ASV on late Tuesday afternoon at Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre to see the event. Never look at the sun directly with the naked eye; you’ll go blind just like Galileo.