Saturday March 21st 2009. Launch -?? days.
It looks like the countdown will resume very soon if nothing unexpected happens. There are all kinds of rumours flying around (take a lot of very intelligent people all with an intense interest in a particular issue and try to STOP rumours flying around). My guess though is that an announcement is imminent and that when it happens we will be in the last few weeks before launch. However, there are all sorts of issues involved here. In particular, if we were to have a launchpad problem and cannot launch on the reserve day either, then we are looking at a minimum of a 10-day turnaround time before a launch attempt can be made and things will get very complicated again.
This is our last weekend working for a while. Today the engineers have put on line and configured a back-up server, on a Saturday, with only minimum team and support available. This means that if anything happens to our main server, we now have a back-up available and can switch rapidly. It was a huge job and they have even managed to get some preliminary tests done. This means that we have two days to get some proper testing done before this particular test campaign ends and we can hammer out some of the bugs before the final pre-launch tests. By testing now, we avoid the risk of problems with the server when we start using it intensively in the final test campaign.
Next week we have two workshops to show astronomers how to process Herschel data. Just to give you an idea, the data processing package is 1.5GB in size and requires a minimum of 2GB of memory to run. I have to give a talk in each workshop on download: one more job to add to the list… This evening I was able to start preparing my talk, after the slightly disconcerting discovery that with my computer than has a mere 1GB of memory and 70GB of disk, the program would not even install, let alone run. Our “highly dangerous Greek” (his description, not mine – as he is a software developer, maybe “dangerous geek” is a more apt description – don’t get software developers angry, or very nasty things are liable to happen with your computer) got to work on this and managed to make an installer that would actually work on my computer. What happened to the computers that I knew when I started working in the observatory with the big disk that held 40MB??? (Most of us only got to use a computer with a 20MB disk)
Oh yes. And