Friday June 5th 2009. Day 22.

 

Well, I missed the fun yesterday. Not because of any great goings-on with Herschel (which seems to be going far more smoothly than any of us dared to hope), but because of a visitor to our building. A very large snake was photographed outside. Admittedly it was a grass snake and so, inoffensive, but in the sequence of photos taken by one of our braver computer operators, the snake actually appeared to strike at the camera in the final shot. Not everyone was completely happy about this visit. In fact, a couple of the secretaries were terrified. It’s the price that we pay for that gorgeous countryside and being close to a couple of rivers. This area is lousy with snakes, not all of which are inoffensive,

 

On the Herschel front, things are very quiet. It’s hard to know what to think. Are we just having a quite astonishing run of luck? Or is Herschel just working unbelievably well and I use the word “unbelievably” quite deliberately. Herschel must be the most complex piece of machinery ever launched into space and its instruments are quite exceptionally advanced. To date though, the check-out, which made us extremely nervous, has gone so smoothly that there has been far less work to do than we expected. Rather than the constant panics that we expected as we tried to solve problems, few problems have appeared. We cannot relax and are in a constant state of stress waiting for problems to happen. In fact though, the biggest problem that we saw early in the mission – and it was not exactly a huge issue anyway – just disappeared progressively. However, at the end of next week we open the cryocover and the real work starts. That is when we discover the difference between theory and practice in operating the Herschel instruments. Meanwhile, a weekend at work beckons: what will it bring?

 

As a footnote to yesterday, I noticed that over the 11 councils contested yesterday in the south of England, from Cornwall in the west to Kent in the east, just 19 of 787 councillors represent the Labour party. Is this healthy for democracy? Draw a line from Bristol to London and, south of it, the Labour party barely exists any longer except in a few increasingly reduced city enclaves. In contrast, in the big cities of the north you will barely find a Conservative counsellor. It is not good to have a country split so completely in two. Mind you, that is the situation in several other EU countries and they seem to have survived.

 

Unofficial Herschel image of the day archive:

http://www.observadores-cometas.com/Herschel/Image_of_the_day/image_of_the_day.htm

 

Frequent updates are provided during the day on the Herschel Twitter (ESAHerschel) here: http://twitter.com/

 

You can follow Herschel testing and observations in real time on the Twitter.