Tuesday March 24^th 2009. Launch -?? days.

We are told that an announcement on launch is imminent in the next day or two. Meanwhile, we will be fuelling-up in the end apparently next weekend. And, yes, not a lot is going to stop us now. Enough messing around… Herschel is GO (barring unexpected disasters – of course, if there were such a thing as an expected disaster we would be ready for it and would stop it)! The informed word is that a formal announcement is expected by Friday, but that things look better than promising. In fact, today an important document has come out revised for the new launch date and time. We will have a launch window of a fraction under 42 minutes. Curiously, the time end of the launch window each day remains almost constant, changing by just a few seconds per day, but the start of the launch window gets earlier by about 45s per day. Right now we are looking at a formal launch time of 13:24:24 UT.

Last night I cycled home in convoy with our retired Italian banker. This is quite relaxing as it means throttling back a fair bit to avoid losing him. We did have one moment of shear comic genius. On the long straight I had slowed to allow him to catch my wheel. Suddenly, not exactly to my surprise, he rocketed past me with a peculiar grin on his face. We are both fans of the Don Camilo stories and movies and I was already thinking of the scene in “Don Camilo and the Honourable Peppone” when the two race each other on the bicycles on the way back from the train station. Obviously we had both been thinking the same thing and the expression on his face as he passed me reproduced the scene from the film perfectly. Wonderful stuff! We both had a good laugh about it afterwards.

Today, technology let me down. I have used this particular computer for many talks both in our lecture room and around Europe without great problems. Today though, the computer threw a major tantrum and absolutely refused to see the projector despite all efforts from our computer expert. My talk was about the installation of the software for reducing Herschel data. A year ago we were warned that it might not be until a year after launch that the software would really be ready but, even now, the software is in a good enough state that people will be able to do a lot with it. The numbers for the software package that users are trying out are truly impressive: 1938 folders; 88 342 files; 1.5GB in total and a recommendation to run it on a computer with at least 4GB of memory!

This afternoon I received a surprise invitation. Our sister satellite, Planck, requires a new scientist who, in many ways, will be my counterpart in Planck. I was asked by the Planck team if I would serve on the interview board. A rather nice gesture by them.

This evening, I spent some more time working on the book proposal. It looks like “The Physics of Cricket” has real possibilities of going ahead. It’s a little escape from the stress of work.