use Perl

Completely forgot to mention that I just spent 3 hours watching the Saturn Orbital Insertion webcast while discussing it on IRC with the usual gang. It was pretty cool, though the whole affair didn't seem as tension-riddled as the Mars rover landings were. I suppose orbital insertions are more "routine" and less prone to horrible fuckups. The dumbass-friendly announcer lady was pretty horrifying though. She looked like Connie Chung and Skeletor had a baby, and kept harping on PARTICLES that were about to hit the probe. Aaaah, PARTICLES!

Pretty cool, overall. Even got to see some things get learned, as the doppler-tracking of a carrier wave (to detect changes in speed during insertion burn) behaved differently than they expected during occultations by the rings. In a nutshell, it turns out the rings don't completely obscure radio LOS, not even the dense B ring, they just make signal power drop (from a whopping 9dB) and fluctuate (between 1 and 3dB). All hail the DSN.