Saturday June 6th 2009. Day 23.

 

Today has ended up being an extremely quiet day. Part of this is down to the fact that we are moving into a somewhat more routine phase of commissioning activities and part due to the fact that things continue to go rather smoothly. Next week we expect things to liven-up. If they do not we may well reduce sharply the number of people on duty at weekends from the current 15 approximately to perhaps just 5 or 6.

 

Things were so quiet that people started to drift away early this afternoon, but not before one of those conversations that you don’t get with your average lunch. Over the last few days we have been wondering just why we build up such large amounts of momentum in our on-board fly wheels. One of the official answers was “radiation pressure”. Now we frankly did not believe that radiation pressure could make a satellite that weighs more than 3.5 tonnes start spinning. We started to discuss this over lunch and, in a spirit of utter disbelief, set out to check the numbers. Various of us supplied equations, advice and physical constants as the Boss started to calculate furiously on his paper tablemat. After about ten minutes he came up victoriously with the number 70 Newton-metres/second. Mission Control had calculated 20 Nm/s using somewhat more sophisticated methods and more exact data, so we were extremely surprised and proud of our answer.

 

 

This evening, when it became obvious that there was going to be no reaction from Darmstadt to our latest delivery of observations (we are now at least 4 days ahead of the deadline, which may explain why the people at Mission Control are a bit more relaxed) I decided to abandon the Marie Celeste too. After an afternoon of heavy, lowering clouds and storms all round the evening was beginning to brighten. So, I set off up the hill with the wind blowing at my back – a pleasant change if ever there was one – and off home. Over the brow of the hill some heavy showers could be seen in the far distance “no problem” I thought... That was a mistake. About 3km from home, where the long uphill section started, the heavens opened. When I got home even my underpants were soaked and had to be changed. The one piece of good news was that even soaked and with my clothes sticking to me, I managed to get home in 21m25s, which is a pretty good time (23 minutes is about normal).

 

When I got home, I found the enhanced image of the Boss showing off his serviette with the calculations on it that you see above: he wants a high-quality version placed on the notice board with the funny caption. With things going so well, why is the Boss worried about enhancing his image? The image was replaced, the caption re-touched and dispatched by return… after I had changed into dry clothes!

 

 

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.