Thursday February 19^th 2009. Launch -56 days.

The Boss says that the number above seems to have come down awfully fast from 77. The truth is that there are just 8 weeks left until we launch. This is beginning to get awfully real, although I reckon that the critical point when it will hit home is this time next week when the “5” in front will tick down to a “4”. When we get under 50 days every tick of the countdown clock will seem to go faster than the last.

Right now everything is going into fast forward. Right now we feel far more confident about our part than we did two weeks ago. We have some work to do, but the situation is not critical. However, what is obvious is that we need the first week of our next test to go quietly. The buzz word that we use is “nominal”: if everyone says “nominal” in the briefings we are well content, although it always produces suppressed giggles. The next two weeks are going to be pretty intense. New disks and computers have to be installed. New software tested. Our aim is that at the end of the first week of March we will have all the computers and software that we will use at launch and will give them a careful shakedown, leaving a month to fix any last minute bugs that appear.

Yesterday we felt relaxed enough to go off and play golf for a couple of hours in the evening as the nights shorten. For the record, the Herschel component played well enough, although narrowly beaten by a scientist from SMOS: oh the humiliation! Next time we’ll beat him! To make up for it I ended up working until very late. Today after a golf lesson in the evening (yes, we need them) I finally left the office at 9pm, but an hour of fresh air and sunshine did us no harm. However, I can see the list of jobs to do in the next week increasing alarmingly.