Monday February 23^rd 2009. Launch -52 days.

We have had a remarkably quiet day, perhaps aided by the fact that Mondays tend to be days of meetings so that at times the corridor seems like a ghost ship. Part of the reason why things are quiet is that the instrument teams are still struggling somewhat with the deliveries that they are making of observations for the first 150 days after launch. For this large chunk of the mission all the instruments will get checked-out carefully, as will the spacecraft, while we are still cruising to Lagrange. Each instrument has to produce a plan to check the operation of their instrument, calibrate it, demonstrate its sensitivity and, in general, have it ready for astronomers. This means planning in detail, literally second by second, what each instrument will do for the first 5 months of flight: very much a mammoth task. Later, this plan will get changed on the fly as some calibrations get completed sooner than expected, while others fail or needed to be repeated. However, even if we know that the plan will change later, it has to be made. We will then go through the plan, day by day, checking the observations, ensuring that all is consistent, resolving conflicts and omissions and making any adjustments that are needed. Preparing these observations is very testing for the instrument teams, as it is a big task, but an absolutely necessary one and taking them rather longer than they had intended.

Elsewhere, there is little news. This is definitely a case of “no news is good news”: if we do hear news coming out of the launch preparations in Kourou it is unlikely to be good. Right now, all we want is a quiet launch campaign and to meet that April 16^th date with no scares along the way. Right now things look set fair for a launch on schedule.