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
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