Tuesday February 10^th 2009. Launch -65 days.

Today (almost) all of the news has been good. As many of us are living in the peculiar time warp that working weekends produces it is sometimes not easy to remember what day it is. Today I have spent most of the day convinced that it is Wednesday: not that the day of the week actually makes any difference really most days. This week though, the day IS important and I still can’t remember it.

The great odyssey has already started. However, nothing is ever so simple. Herschel’s great journey has coincided with a great storm. Paris’s three airports are, or at least, have been closed. The British Isles and Northern France have taken a beating from high winds and The Netherlands are just a little further up the coast. Industry experts needed at Kourou are cooling their heels at various airports, waiting for the storm to pass. This has also had an effect on Herschel’s journey. Herschel itself, which leaves Noordwijk tomorrow morning, should not be affected. It will be loaded into the transport aircraft and will leave at some time during the morning, destination Kourou. However, to receive Herschel at Kourou, a lot of specialist equipment and staff are required. These, obviously, have to arrive first. The giant Antonov has had to take a special routing around the storm, flying to Porto in Portugal, on to the Cape Verde Islands and then down to Kourou. This is picturesquely described as taking the scenic route. Herschel itself, taking advantage of time zones and the fact that, unlike the equipment, it will be able to fly direct, will arrive late tomorrow night (early Thursday morning, our time) and everything will need to be unloaded at some ungodly hour of the night.

Today everyone feels more cheerful and the atmosphere is more relaxed. The engineers have found one really nasty little bug in our system that may well have been the cause of all our problems. This tricky little beggar managed to sneak past our tests, thanks to another problem that has since been fixed. In simple terms, the engineers have greatly increased the total amount of memory in our system and also used bigger memory chips. It’s like a pipeline: you can increase the number of pipes and that will allow more stuff to flow down them, but if someone is trying to shove something too big into the pipe, it will clog. That is what our engineers have found: bigger memory chips equate to wider pipes and we now have more of them too and, hey presto! Suddenly, everything suddenly has started to work. They have also found a subtle programming error that may make things worse. All in all it has been a good day for the good guys.