Tuesday January 27th 2009. Launch -79 days.

Greetings from Darmstadt! I am in the hotel having arrived about three hours ago for a meeting at Mission Control. A tip-off from a colleague who is a regular on the flight to Frankfurt led us to book on LAN Chile. I have to say that it is one of the best flights that I have ever had, despite a slightly bumpy take-off due to the wind. Cycling home at midday the strength of the wind up the last, steep hill where I was battling to make any forward progress at all, suggested that there might be some turbulence on the flight today and there was. What it must have been like right at the back of the plane I hate to think. Fortunately it was an Airbus 340, in which I have great confidence, if only because my father helped to design the wings.

Over the almost 3 years that I have been working for Herschel, trips to meetings have been infrequent enough to be a novelty still. Darmstadt is a beautiful town and although the visits are always very brief, it is a real pleasure to go out into town and have dinner. It is only 3ºC outside, but it is dry and there is no wind, so it is not unpleasant. In the hotel lobby the Boss and I met up with the Principal Investigator of PACS, one of Herschel’s three instruments who offered to take us somewhere new to eat. We arranged to meet up for dinner at 19:30 and were guided to an excellent restaurant/beer hall near the hotel, owned by a former student of our guide. We had an excellent working dinner where we heard about some results from the very last round of tests that the spacecraft is undergoing. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it seems that they have uncovered a bug in the data being received from at least one of the instruments. This is good news, because that is what tests are for: you want to find the bugs before we launch and not after; but bad news because, until the source of the problem is located, it is an additional worry to the overloaded instrument teams. Tomorrow, in the meeting hopefully the experts at Mission Control will tell us that it’s a trivial problem and easy to fix. With launch so close, any new problem is a major concern.