Monday March 9th 2009. Launch -38 days.

 

That number certainly jumps down over the weekend: on Friday I left it on the noticeboard at T-41d; today we are down to T-38d. When I started this blog we were at T-90d. We are now a month and one week from launch.

 

A lot of snippets of news are coming out of Kourou. Launch has been confirmed as being on April 16th. We now have a slightly modified launch time, delayed 18 minutes with respect to the one that we had previously, to 13:34UT. Today the last round of instrument tests are going on. When we got our last update a couple of hours ago the main part of the test had been completed successfully and the back-up part was being tested. The Ariane 5 launcher has now been moved to the assembly building where it will finally be mated to Herschel and Planck. Some work still has to be done testing the spacecraft, but the Herschel instruments are just about ready to fly. The next step is to move the satellites into another building on the 20th and fill their thruster tanks with hydrazine. Everything seems to be going extremely well.

 

Closer to home, we started the simulations today. The start has been a little slow. In fact, mid-afternoon, the report suggested that it was a little like the start in The Wacky Races when Dick Dastardly chains the other competitors to a post before shifting into reverse by mistake and freeing them. It looks like the Internet or, at least, our network, had a funny turn for a while before fixing itself of its own accord. Tomorrow morning I’ll find out more. We are optimistic that things will work well, but then we’ve said that before. Switch-on day is always the riskiest and if we get away with no great problems the rest of the exercise should be (fairly) straightforward.

 

Everyone here uses Schipol airport in Amsterdam, recently scene of a frightening accident with a Turkish Airways flight. This was being discussed over lunch today as any incident at an airport that we use has a particular interest. When the accident happened we were discussing what might have caused it, but extremely puzzled by the conflicting evidence. Now, it seems that the cause is pretty well understood, but it has caused some consternation. It seems that the altimeter, which had been reported faulty a few days earlier, had a 560-m zero-point error. The landing was on autopilot and, when the plane reached 560-m altitude the autopilot cut the engines back to minimum thrust. The plane lost flying speed and stalled. I have a particular interest in this as my father spent more than 40 years designing commercial and military aircraft. An obvious question was why the engines cut out when, on landing, they do not. My guess is that the autopilot reduced thrust to minimum as a pilot would on landing before throwing in the thrust reverser and ramping up the power to maximum. The engines were still running when the plane hit the ground, but at too low a thrust to maintain flying speed and the pilot had no time to cut out the autopilot and recover control. It made us shudder.

 

Tonight I am watching “Starship Troppers”. It is not a pretty film, although the effects are pretty good. It is based, very loosely, on the Robert Heinlein novel of the same name that I have special memories of because I bought it at Bristol Tempel Meads station to read on the train to London for my university interview. It was the first science fiction novel that I bought. Although heavily criticised for its militaristic vision of the future it is a cracking good story and one that was undoubtedly influenced by the Second World War (substitute “Nazis” for “bugs” and bring the story back in time a few centuries and you have the struggle for survival that many of our parents and grandparents faced), during which Heinlein worked, I believe, in the navy dockyards. Sometimes real life is not pretty.