Monday February 9^th 2009. Launch -66 days.

This is definitely Herschel’s big week. On Wednesday Herschel gets sent to Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport – the 35km journey with a police escort will take several hours – and loaded into a transport aircraft for the flight to Kourou. Herschel will arrive on the morning of February 12^th and will be transported to the integration facility to be mated with its Ariane 5-ECA rocket, which arrived a week ago today. Then, around 23:09 CET, an Ariane 5-ECA will launch two communications satellites and two French military satellites. This will be the last launch before Herschel’s date with destiny on April 16^th. If all goes well on Thursday February 12^th that launch date will suddenly be a whole lot closer. If you want to see the launch live, it will be broadcast on the Internet at:

http://www.videocorner.tv/videocorner2/live_flv/index.php?langue=en

Herschel has been posing for the cameras, having previously been somewhat camera-shy. The BBC has produced a beautiful short video report on Herschel with some wonderful images (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7868349.stm), well worth looking at. The accompanying report, which calls Herschel “The Silver Surfer” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7864087.stm) has been one of the BBC’s most emailed stories today.

Our engineers are definitely getting closer to understanding what is happening with our system and the atmosphere is definitely more relaxed. This is good. Our NASA representative arrived today, so I spent a while this afternoon putting him in the picture.

Tonight I got home at 8pm and felt that it was almost like a holiday. I did things like throwing out the rubbish, putting on a washing machine and vacuuming that would normally get done at the weekend.