Hellllllllllllllllo, Saturn!!

New vocabulary: SOI: Saturn Orbit Insertion. Here's hoping that SOI is not equal to SOL.

I'm seeing familiar views in mission control. feel a little better knowing what, for instance "fault" is (the one that tracks when faults happen and what they are).

Not really blogging it. (No one's really at this site) Just watching it and enjoying it via IM (auntialias)

I keep hearing them talk about "saturnian" which sounds like the wine: sauterne. Maybe that's the appropriate wine to drink for this event!

More thoughts: Doc M is all on pins and needles today/tonight. He was on the lab and went home to his house where the local cable channel did NOT display NASA TV (heh. Inadvertantly typed in NADA TV...) Don't know why the cable company dropped it; it serves the neighborhood right near JPL... you'd think.... So he managed to get the NASA TV webcast. earlier he said that radar plays a much larger role in Cassini than it did with Mars (for Mars, radar played a very short but significant role in EDL: the radar locks onto the ground to tell the distance in order to determine when to fire the retro rockets). Radar is going to be used to find out more about the topography of some surface... below clouds/vapor.

There's a communication blockout till 5 or 6 minutes after the hour. I'm sure that the collective water pressure at JPL dropped a bit.... and it's a good time to fix a little smackerel of something.

CASSINI IS CAPTURED IN ORBIT!! Yeehaw!

Signal returning.... as expected. 9:05 (after this they have but 1.5 hours owrth of burn fuel in tank).

Comments

[Donald Larson]

Susan,

Thanks for the earlier updates. I watched the JPL webcast since early this evening.

I remember when Alan Shepard first went into space. I listened to that Mercury mission on my 8-transistor radio in my grade-school class.

So many changes since then.

Don