Thursday March 26^th 2009. Launch -?? days.

I spent most of my afternoon wrestling with the minutes of yesterday afternoon’s Videocon with the instrument managers about plans for the third simulations campaign. I wanted to have a proper debate about what to do and how to do it as the campaign will be short and must be carefully focussed and, many people will take an extended leave over Easter, which means that there is less time to prepare than we might like. It was a good debate and people, at times, spoke bluntly, which was good too. However, trying to distil everything into a coherent set of minutes was quite a task. Given that what we discussed and agreed should form the core of our plans for the test, actually recording accurately is rather important! I take a pragmatic approach to such things and try to record accurately what people really said in as much detail as is necessary. Sometimes though writing up my notes is a nightmare afterwards though if the debate has been fast and wide-ranging.

Apart from that, things are really quite quiet, always reassuring at this stage before a launch. Yesterday I gave the talk from Tuesday again to the second workshop. This time I did not trust to technology and things went well. During the lunch break I had a long chat to some of the participants, including one of the grand old men of instrumentation about the workshop and their impressions.

Other things: we assume that tomorrow (Friday) the formal launch date will be announced. More than the planned date, which must be the worst kept secret in ESA, it is the formal go-ahead to launch that the announcement symbolises. It means that those problems that were worrying the top management have been settled and no reason can be seen for a further delay. For everyone it will be a massive relief to get those two annoying little “??” signs from the top of the page replaced with a number (although I am still, every morning, changing the countdown on the Herschel notice board, based on the top secret date for launch). No one here wants any further delay, particularly when there is absolutely nothing that we can do about it.

A little light relief this evening. As I was leaving, the person who administers my contract was just putting on his helmet and getting on his bike to go. As I left the gate, he was just disappearing round the corner at the top of the hill, a few hundred metres ahead. Okay, he is a little older than me, but his bike is a Ferrari compared to my Minardi (my bike is cheap, very heavy and would make Lance Armstrong cry if he saw it). Within the first kilometre he had been overhauled and we set off down the hill to the roundabout at a fair old rate of knots. For some reason I just don’t build up so much speed on the downhill and he had almost caught me again going into a new uphill section at which point he yelled something at me about it being good training and was rewarded by seeing me streak off again into the distance up the hill. Thanks for warning me that you were on my tail! As you may have noticed, this weekend it is Formula 1 again and with so many different nationalities here the local rivalries heat up and a fair bit of leg-pulling goes on. What is clear is that you should not trust practice times, ever! We’ll see on Sunday who is laughing… after the race. The only problem is that the race is at an ungodly hour and it’s also the night that the clocks go forward.

Finally, this evening it was supermarket time with Signor Peppone, our retired banker. And, of course, various items from my purchase have stayed in his car! They will be recovered over the weekend.