Wednesday March 11^th 2009. Launch -36 days.

Yesterday I forgot to recount and incident riding home last night on the bike. It was just before 8pm and dark and I was steaming up the steep hill away from work when a loud noise in the undergrowth alongside the bicycle startled me. I turned to look for the source of the noise, which persisted, tracking me up the last slopes of the hill, right alongside. Finally, it appeared… two panicked wild boar were running alongside the bicycle and I, in turn, was getting increasingly concerned that they might suddenly turn and run in front of me, causing an accident. In the end, they dived into the undergrowth. One of my colleagues actually hit and killed a wild boar driving along the same stretch of road one evening last winter.

On another tack, it looks like the “The Physics of Cricket” project is going ahead. After a couple of exchanges of e-mails it seems that the Managing Editor’s ideas on level and content of the book and my ideas on level and content are coinciding to a fair degree. The publisher is now going to send me its author questionnaire to fill in. This book looks like it is going to be fun to do.

Today more good news has come out of Kourou. The third and final instrument to undergo testing has passed with flying colours. We are now very close to the move to the assembly building. This move has been brought forward by 2 days to March 18^th, meaning that the filling of the thruster tanks with hydrazine will start on the 20^th. However, we are still four weeks from the final move to the building where Herschel and Planck will be mated with the Ariane 5.

Today we have seen something unprecedented in all tests: the system worked… just about perfectly! The data came over the line from Mission Control and was sent by our system to the Instrument Control Centres. The moment when the data was complete was detected correctly and data reduction routines started running automatically. In short, a textbook exercise. What made it even better was that several minor incidents happened that a month ago would have made the process grind to a halt but, with our new, more robust system, it survived these little wrinkles and kept on going. Why is it that at the 59^th minute of the 11^th hour the troops come up trumps? There is a theory that it takes the adrenaline charge of a crisis (small/medium/large – delete to taste) to get people working at their best.

The bad news is that my own particular work this afternoon processing the deliveries of observations by the instruments has been halted by a configuration problem. “Ah! I rather expected that…” – please, next time that you expect a problem when you change something that works, don’t change it!!! (no names – you know who you are) Such is life. The problem is easy enough to fix, just rather frustrating. Tomorrow things will go better.