Go, Space!

I felt sick all afternoon and evening last night. I think maybe there was some bad bacon in my Wendy's hamburger. It did give me the perfect excuse not to do anything after work, though. Instead I watched TV all evening. I actually had a dilema on what to watch. Friends was on TBS (the last season reruns). Next Action Star was on NBC, and I was checking it out for the first time. I was not all that great. For a show about people filming a scene of a commando rescue, there was disappointingly little shooting or blowing up of things. Some, but less than ideal. The Wimbledon women's quaterfinals were also on. What a quandery!

I also watched baseball tonight. I didn't stay up long enough to see Randy Johnson get his 4,000th strike out, though (the Diamondbacks still lost). I did stay up long enough to see Carlos Beltran hit his first home run as an Astro, and to see the Astros give all the runs up again. :P I wish that had been in the other order.

It's an exciting day in space today. This afternoon, the ISS crew is going to try again to do an EVA to fix the gyroscopes. Tonight at 9:30PM central, Cassini will fire its engines to capture into orbit around Saturn. I've been very interested in the Cassini mission since I was given a chance to work on it as a co-op. I didn't go on that tour, but I've been following it since. Cassini could very well be the last of the big planetary explorers. It has a probe (Huygens) that will enter Titan's atmosphere around Christmas time and try to detect the composition of the atmosphere and the surface. We spent part of the morning at work trying to reconstruct the relative size of the Cassini engines and the Shuttle attitude jets. :) I work in a dorky place.