Sunday March 15^th 2009. Launch -?? days.

Another weekend, another working day. A brilliantly sunny Sunday morning with nearly empty roads made it a serious pleasure to get out today. Although my legs are a little tired, it was a fast run into work, enjoying the ride. As a result I was in earlier than any other day this month and only once have left work later. Probably within a couple of days I will have an “Official” launch date that I can share – the current, target date for launch is one of the worst-kept secrets in science – so the mystery as to how long the delay will be will be retained for a while longer.

There is something pleasing about a weekend day at work, There were 22 of us today, plus various people preparing the big media event tomorrow for the launch of Goce. The weather was wonderful and with telephones NOT ringing, modest quantities of email and most things working pretty well, we were actually able to get some real work done without distractions, but in a quite relaxed atmosphere. We all had lunch outside together on the terrace and were well looked after by the cook.

I have now almost finished checking and processing the 13 days of simulated observations. It has been a real eye-opener. One day is left but, by 7pm tiredness was starting to take over and nearly an hour was lost back-tracking to locate a tired mistake (a “6” had been accidentally changed to a “7” in one of the dozens of files that I was editing and processing). When that happens, you know that it is time to cut your losses and stop once the problem is fixed. However, there was also the great satisfaction of knowing that it was me who found the mistake and fixed it, not someone else. One day is left to do tomorrow. At the same time, work is continuing programming real observations that will be made after the real launch in a few weeks time.

This week we have seen that the system is getting better and better at surviving the slings and arrows of outrageous glitches. In fact, things are quite genuinely becoming routine, which was, after all, the whole idea of doing this testing. Today we have had some discussions on how to liven things up a bit from tomorrow. In fact, tomorrow’s morning briefing at 11 is going to have an interesting finish [and, as I know that some of my colleagues do read this Blog, I’m afraid that I am giving you no hints as to what will happen].