Friday February 13th
2009. Launch -62 days.
Herschel landed
at
http://herschel.esac.esa.int/Images/2009/Herschel_arrival_in_Cayenne_P1010991web.jpg
http://herschel.esac.esa.int/Images/2009/Herschel_arrival_in_Cayenne_P1020005web.jpg
http://herschel.esac.esa.int/Images/2009/Herschel_arrival_in_Cayenne_P1020007web.jpg
According to the files, the photos were taken between 00:24 and 00:37 local time in Cayenne, which was before the transport aircraft with the telescope was expected to land, so there is a suggestion that we are seeing the special ground equipment being unloaded, not the telescope itself (our detectives suggest that the box looks a bit small to hold a telescope that is about 7.5-m long and 4m wide. It’s amazing that it seems so hard to get photos!!!
Anyway, as we all heaved a massive sigh of relief, Herschel has made its first flight successfully. Soon it will have its second.
Elsewhere the news is of some impressive progress. Given the database problems that we had, our (retired) former database expert has been persuaded to come for three days and help out. Possibly terrified by the thought that he might be asked to stay for longer, his expert eye is finding all kinds of minor configuration issues that he is correcting and optimisations that can be made. My two dinner guests from last night are very impressed. Many of the issues are the sort of thing that only a real expert would find but, in total, fixing them all gives real hope that the system performance will improve massively.
Sometimes people
find it hard to understand why we have problems. The Herschel code is millions
of lines and different systems interact in complex ways. 90% of the system
works almost perfectly and 5% works adequately: it’s the last 5% that we need
to fix. People are doing a great job trying to fix it.