Wednesday February 18th 2009. Launch -57 days.

This has been an interesting day. It’s one of those days when it does not feel that I have done so much, but actually it has been a lot more than it appeared to be. The focal points of the day were an “all hands” presentation by our new Head of Division, who gave an excellent talk about his career and how he came to be Head of Division, followed by news about upcoming missions, budgets and organisation. It really was an excellent talk, full of curious anecdotes, good humour and information. It turns out that he and I have two observatories in common and swapped anecdotes about our experiences when we met up in the corridor later. He could not give us the scoop as to which planetary mission was chosen by NASA and ESA for their joint exploration mission as it was not public at that time (it was announced that it is the Jupiter mission, which will explore Europa, which beat the mission to Saturn’s moon Titan and Enceladus by – I suspect – a tiny margin), but did give us a lot of good news.

 

It turns out that I have a vested interest in the Titan-Enceladus mission as Herschel will be taking observations of the two moons for me in 2010 when the rings are edge-on, in the hope of detecting the eruption of ice volcanoes. Both missions offer superb science and fascinating possibilities and I suspect that the decision was an exceptionally tough one. However, it turns out that both are going to continue under study with the possibility that both may even go ahead at some point.

 

More interesting was the news that not only did he start working on Herschel many years ago, when it was still called FIRST and was planned to be an 8-m telescope – this was a surprise to us, we did not know that he had a vested interest in our success – but also that he offered the likelihood that work on two medium-sized missions will start about the time that Herschel is winding-down and a large mission 1-2 years afterwards. This gives the prospect that there will be life after Herschel: many of us were looking a little fearfully at the lack of missions 5-10 years down the line.

 

In the afternoon we had the Videocon to launch planning for the second Simulations campaign, which will start in the second week of March. This is a crucial test as we will finally have everything, hardware and software installed, that we will be using at launch. We hope and expect that everything will work extremely well, but there is only one way to find out. It was a long and occasionally difficult meeting in which we tried to find common ground between sometimes violently conflicting interests. People are busy and have worked extremely hard and this time we are requesting an even bigger effort. However, even if an effort now will be compensated by having an easier time of it after launch, it is still hard to find the time to fit in what needs to be done and teams need to be handled sympathetically and we have to do our best to accommodate our plans to their difficulties. In the end, I felt that the meeting went well and that it was productive: definitely I am getting the hang of this.