Herschel Blog: The Last Three Months

Friday January 16th 2009

Finally, we have reached it. Today Version 20 of the Herschel Space Observatory schedule has come out showing launch on April 16^th 2009: exactly three months away. The planners in the Project Office say that this will be the last release of the schedule. What this means is that with the ground tests almost over and the last big set-piece test done before Christmas, we can be confident that things are almost ready for launch and that the launch date is realistic. The word “realistic” is hard to understand if you aren’t inside the project.

People who don’t work in a project like this simply cannot imagine what goes into preparing a launch. The amount of work and the quantity and intensity of testing is absolutely immense. It’s not just the spacecraft, the satellite, the telescope and its instruments, but all the systems on the ground that will control it. Herschel, the biggest telescope by some distance ever to be launched into space, is a huge project involving hundreds of people on five continents. Millions of components and elements have to be tested and every failure corrected and re-tested. When everything is joined together, a small failure in one element can cause a huge problem in an apparently unrelated system elsewhere. And, all the time, we have to remember that when we launch the telescope will be beyond all aid, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Despite all the jokes that we make about it, we can’t send up a team member with a screwdriver and a soldering iron to fix anything that goes wrong. An apparently trivial problem can take weeks or months to fix, or can cause knock-on effects that produce months of delay. What the launch date announcement means is that people are confident that we have found all the major bugs; fixed all the important problems and can be confident that there is nothing serious left in the system that could threaten in its success.

Of course, there is still some testing to go and the satellite still has to be shipped to Kourou, mated to the Ariane 5 and prepared for launch and something could still go wrong in this process, but we are a big big step closer to the great day that has been planned for more than 15 years now.

And today, as if we did not already appreciate how intense things will be this year, we have now been given strict instructions on leave: no absences longer than 3 days; no leisure travel until after the launch has happened. And with good reason too: no one knows at the moment whose absence might be critical at any particular time in the next few months. Once we are through launch, time off will be necessary because we will be working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week and sometimes pulling all-nighters but, right now, we need one last, big effort to make sure that the guys in Kourou can light the blue touchpaper at 13:45:32.1732 UT on April 16^th.

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The opiniones expressed here are the personal opinions of the author and should not be identified with those of the European Space Agency in any way, shape or form.