Friday February 20^th 2009. Launch -55 days.

Today has been a slightly odd day. Quite a number of people are either away on holiday, or working somewhere else, meaning that it has been a quite quiet day at work. Add to that the fact that all the computers had to be switched off late in the afternoon as essential maintenance is being carried out on site power supplies all through the weekend and some computers were switched off earlier as they were being maintained, so many people went home early. There were also an important set of deadlines that people had to meet today. With the computers going off, including e-mail, anything that was not finished by 4 in the afternoon – the latest time at which computers were guaranteed to be available – would not be finished before Monday.

So, what has happened today? Well, to start with, we have passed another major milestone. Today was the deadline for the three instruments to submit all the test observations that they will carry out for the first 6 months of the Herschel mission. This period, which is split into three phases, is when the satellite, telescope and instruments will be carefully, step by step, checked out and calibrated in space, before carrying out a series of high-priority observations to demonstrate the scientific capabilities of the telescope. We have received the first 40 or so days of observations to check out and plan. This is going to be a massive job involving a lot of people and will occupy us for most of next week, while the preparation of these observations has fully occupied the instrument teams for several weeks now. What this means is that, by the end of next week, we will have a substantial fraction of the observing programme of Herschel for the first six months prepared, planned and ready to send to the satellite.

The second thing was that today was the deadline to prepare and distribute the first version of the report of the big spacecraft test that was held just before Christmas. I have the somewhat dubious honour to do this. I say “dubious” because with so many activities of great urgency going on at the same time, writing a report like this is the last thing that most people want yet I needed to get some text out of no less than thirteen people who represent different teams, put it together into some kind of coherent whole and add a whole lot of introductory text myself. For the record, ten out of thirteen did cough up after various degrees of pressure and pleading were applied, the last of them just before lunch today. This led to race to incorporate more than 40 pages of text into the final report and send it before the e-mail was switched-off, with the assumption that the cut-off point was 4pm. In the rush, which led to an adrenalin surge that got uncomfortably close at times to panic, one small detail was left out. In the report of the first major spacecraft test in September I used Wellington’s “it was a damned fine thing” (usually misquoted as “it was a damn close run thing”) as the quote to introduce the final report. For the report of the recent tests I have already decided on General von Möltke’s “no plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy” (both these quotes sum up the content of the report admirably well). For this report though the quote was less certain. In the end, I have decanted for Horace’s “Exegi monumentum aere perennius”, more out of hope than of any expectation that it is true. Anyway, the quote has now been added and will be in the final, revised version that is circulated next week.