Monday June 1st 2009. Day 18.
After a quite intense weekend we are back to much quieter times. The burst of activity over the weekend has allowed us to get a couple of days ahead of the game in the planning. This time in hand though is already threatening to disappear as we need the instrument teams to keep up the flow of planning of observations and the Project team not to make any last-minute changes that slow things down.
We were expecting a lively briefing this morning and, to an extent, got it. Not everyone is happy the yesterday’s events and the total inability of the people at Flight Dynamics to give us solid guidelines with which to work. The problem is that if we plan days of observations and submit them, get them rejected and then have to re-plan them, it gets very stressful for one thing because it changes doing things with some margin of time to spare to doing things hard against the deadlines. When Mission Control needs input from us by 3pm to be sent to the spacecraft the next day it is hardly idea when we discover late that afternoon that what we have sent them is no use. The idea is to keep 2 full days of observations in the satellite’s memory so that if something goes wrong and we cannot send up another day of observations when intended, the spacecraft still has one full day of observations in its memory. If though we are living hand by mouth and only sending new observations the day that they will be executed (i.e. nothing stored in the memory on-board except that day’s observations), there is a danger that the spacecraft could end up lying idle one day: so far there has been no real danger of this happening, but accidents DO happen if you give them a chance to.
This evening I started helping-out with first light planning. There are several possible candidate objects, but we need to see if (a) the objects are visible and (b) what other data they have. Several galaxies have been investigated. Ideally we would like to have images from ISO and Spitzer at a similar wavelength with which to compare. I spent a happy hour or so checking out databases and visibility and then summarising it for two potential candidates.
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:
You can follow
Herschel testing and observations in real time on the Twitter.