Friday February 6^th 2009. Launch -69 days.

Life gets better and better. Today the Flight Qualification Review for Herschel and its sister mission Plank has ended. In a Flight Qualification Review a panel of experts goes through every aspect of a mission, assessing whether or not it is ready for launch: the scrutiny by the panel is intense and merciless and their decision is final. The verdict has been positive. Although the panel appreciates that there is still a lot to do before launch, Herschel has been given permission to be flown to Kourou on February 11^th with Plank following on the 18^th.

In our Simulations campaign things are getting better by the day. We are shaking down the systems very thoroughly. All kinds of things are coming out of the woodwork and being put in the bug jars of our engineers to be squashed. Of course, we are not there yet, but everything is beginning to come together nicely.

Today we finished processing 12 days of simulated observations: 4 for each instrument. They have been checked and found to be correctly prepared and have been released to our Mission Planners to simulate scheduling them. The whole exercise has shown us some gaps in procedures and has been very useful indeed. The Mission Planners will plan the days of observations and pass them to the instrument experts for checking and, if they pass every test, they will receive approval to be sent up to the satellite (of course, this last step will not be carried out).

One other important duty was to speak to the kitchen staff. The cook and one of the helpers will come in specially both Saturday and Sunday to feed us – we expect that anything between 40 and 50 people will appear for lunch, not all of them from Herschel. I spoke to the kitchens to agree a time for lunch – we’ve settled on 1pm – when we will all come to eat so that they can prepare the food and then clear up without having people dribbling in for two hours. Soon after the heavens opened – again – and the snow started falling very hard, leading to some nerves as it settled rapidly. This morning, as I cycled in, I watched the sky getting blacker and blacker and had just reached the entrance when a devilish mixture of cold rain, snow and ice started to fall: it was really odd hearing the ice rattling on my helmet. By leaving time though the sky had cleared and, although the road was wet, it was far safer than it would have been two hours earlier.