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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!