The smile on out long-suffering Development Manager’s face in the cafeteria this morning said it all. Yesterday’s Wacky Race-type start was all down to some weird network problems and, since the problem fixed itself, the system has behaved impeccably. I asked our system engineer this morning if he saw himself in the Dick Dastardly role and he just sniggered like Muttley, so all seems well there. We are happy. Hopefully the 11am briefing will confirm the good news. It is already noticeable that there is not the frenetic air that the pre-Christmas tests had where everyone seemed on the verge of hysteria at times, nor the fatalist “here we go again” of the last test. Right now I am much less busy than I have been in any previous test and that is always a good sign. My time though is coming: suddenly I am going to ramp up from “calm” to “frantically busy” as the breaking wave of activity reaches my office. In a previous test the order was “keep it boring”… that request was made just before a catastrophe happened, so let’s not count our chickens but, normally, if there has been no disaster by the end of the third day of a test you can usually be confident that things are going well.

Yesterday I gave the Boss my list of success criteria: four conditions that, if met, I feel would permit us to declare the test a success. He changed one word, slightly tightening a criterion (i.e. making it tougher). This is our last big exercise and it is important to have some criteria to be able to declare it a success or a failure. A week ago the Boss was still nervous now, I think that he is cautiously confident. However, it is evident that he feels very stressed, The relentless ticking down on the countdown clock reminds us all how little time is left.

Persistence is hammering the remaining bugs and problems in the system flat. Yesterday we had some teething troubles with the new configuration, but nothing serious and, glory be! a triumphant message from our computer manager suggests that our new computer hardware has arrived in the nick of time.

In the end it was a successful day today, albeit a long one. I left work at ten to eight, having arrived at nine-fifteen in the morning and did another couple of hours at home until tiredness decided me to stop and go to bed to read a little. I had arranged to go shopping with my neighbour at the shopping centre, but fortunately he couldn’t make it because I got home about 20 minutes after the time when we had agreed to meet: he was worried that I was waiting and vice versa.

That number certainly jumps down over the weekend: on Friday I left it on the noticeboard at T-41d; today we are down to T-38d. When I started this blog we were at T-90d. We are now a month and one week from launch.

A lot of snippets of news are coming out of Kourou. Launch has been confirmed as being on April 16^th. We now have a slightly modified launch time, delayed 18 minutes with respect to the one that we had previously, to 13:34UT. Today the last round of instrument tests are going on. When we got our last update a couple of hours ago the main part of the test had been completed successfully and the back-up part was being tested. The Ariane 5 launcher has now been moved to the assembly building where it will finally be mated to Herschel and Planck. Some work still has to be done testing the spacecraft, but the Herschel instruments are just about ready to fly. The next step is to move the satellites into another building on the 20^th and fill their thruster tanks with hydrazine. Everything seems to be going extremely well.

Closer to home, we started the simulations today. The start has been a little slow. In fact, mid-afternoon, the report suggested that it was a little like the start in The Wacky Races when Dick Dastardly chains the other competitors to a post before shifting into reverse by mistake and freeing them. It looks like the Internet or, at least, our network, had a funny turn for a while before fixing itself of its own accord. Tomorrow morning I’ll find out more. We are optimistic that things will work well, but then we’ve said that before. Switch-on day is always the riskiest and if we get away with no great problems the rest of the exercise should be (fairly) straightforward.

Everyone here uses Schipol airport in Amsterdam, recently scene of a frightening accident with a Turkish Airways flight. This was being discussed over lunch today as any incident at an airport that we use has a particular interest. When the accident happened we were discussing what might have caused it, but extremely puzzled by the conflicting evidence. Now, it seems that the cause is pretty well understood, but it has caused some consternation. It seems that the altimeter, which had been reported faulty a few days earlier, had a 560-m zero-point error. The landing was on autopilot and, when the plane reached 560-m altitude the autopilot cut the engines back to minimum thrust. The plane lost flying speed and stalled. I have a particular interest in this as my father spent more than 40 years designing commercial and military aircraft. An obvious question was why the engines cut out when, on landing, they do not. My guess is that the autopilot reduced thrust to minimum as a pilot would on landing before throwing in the thrust reverser and ramping up the power to maximum. The engines were still running when the plane hit the ground, but at too low a thrust to maintain flying speed and the pilot had no time to cut out the autopilot and recover control. It made us shudder.

Tonight I am watching “Starship Troppers”. It is not a pretty film, although the effects are pretty good. It is based, very loosely, on the Robert Heinlein novel of the same name that I have special memories of because I bought it at Bristol Tempel Meads station to read on the train to London for my university interview. It was the first science fiction novel that I bought. Although heavily criticised for its militaristic vision of the future it is a cracking good story and one that was undoubtedly influenced by the Second World War (substitute “Nazis” for “bugs” and bring the story back in time a few centuries and you have the struggle for survival that many of our parents and grandparents faced), during which Heinlein worked, I believe, in the navy dockyards. Sometimes real life is not pretty.

“Hmmm, it looks like my ball. What did I want to hit it there for?” One of the ESA team ponders going paddling as the captain watches from the extreme right.

A completely normal, quiet day at home. Some shopping first thing after putting on a washing machine, to put some things in the freezer and have something on hand for breakfast (some rather nice sausages did the trick), vacuum, clean the hamsters, water the plants scattered around the house (I am particularly partial to cactus and bonsais), plant some freesia bulbs and have a relaxed cup of tea. The next two weeks will give plenty of stress and a lot of long hours so I am happy to take it easy today.

“I’ll settle for that!” sending the ball up the mountain on the last hole and even more or less in the right direction.

One of my best shots of the day. Pity that I left it right until the end!

Ideally I would like to have a really boring week. That would indicate that our software has been tamed and that the hardware is working just nicely thank you. In practice, I am not going to hold my breath on this one. If we were to get everything working fine we would probably be the first mission ever to manage it: inevitably, however much work you put in before launch, things are never ever perfect and you spend the first few months straightening out the kinks in the system.

The magnificent eight and our referee/scorers show that there are no hard feelings afterwards.

“You have 14 putts to win from there. Let’s see how you handle some pressure!”

Last night I was watching the film “The Dambusters” in bed. It is a wonderful film about a remarkable story, of which the film captures only a tiny part. At the time, the attack was a tremendous fillip to a country that had suffered badly from Nazi bombing and that had been just six weeks from starvation. In hindsight though it was, if not a military disaster, only a tiny victory, achieved at terrible cost, of which there are so many in any war. Within a few short months the dams had been rebuilt, with German industrial capacity barely being scratched. Only on one level was the raid a decisive success and that was in showing the Nazi leadership that they were no longer impugn, that retribution was coming and that nowhere was safe. The story of ingenuity in solving problems that the book and, later, the film told was remarkable. Maybe I picked the film having watched my Bulgarian teammate yesterday produce a quite remarkable shot that landed around the middle of one of the lakes and then bounced and skipped at least 30 metres, to the point that it looked like it might manage to reach the opposite bank, before finally sinking to agonised groans.

Later, I have two sets of minutes to write-up and send out, but for now I am going to enjoy the fine, sunny warm day. The windows are open and silence enters from outside apart from the occasional snatch of birdsong. Maybe later I will get out the bike and enjoy a ride in the late afternoon sun.

ESA v NASA: March 7th

“Hmmm, it looks like my ball. What did I want to hit it there for?” One of the ESA team ponders going paddling as the captain watches from the extreme right.

“I’ll settle for that!” sending the ball up the mountain on the last hole and even more or less in the right direction.

One of my best shots of the day. Pity that I left it right until the end!

“You have 14 putts to win from there. Let’s see how you handle some pressure!”

The magnificent eight and our referee/scorers show that there are no hard feelings afterward

I wish that I could regale you with a tale of how Herschel’s golfers helped us to a magnificent victory over the NASA team today. Unfortunately, I cannot. In fact, we were absolutely beaten out of sight. Your correspondent was the best player on the ESA team, but that was rather like claiming to be the best football team in Greenland (no slight intended to Greenland’s football, which is undoubtedly better than our golf). No amount of mathematical manipulation can make the result look other than an absolutely awful. The worst score of the NASA team beat our best ever score at the course by a small matter of 10 shots and we are talking about over 9 holes here… Looked at another way, my own score was the third best round that we have registered at the course in our various visits and I was only 16 shots behind the worst NASA score. How can you put a positive spin on that??

However, the weather was wonderful after a long winter – I am even a little sunburnt – we laughed a lot, we had an excellent lunch (the losers paid for the winners with good grace) and we enjoyed it so much that we have agreed to play again in 5 weeks time. One can only assume that we are gluttons for punishment.

Other than that, all quiet on the launchpad front. Various congratulatory messages have gone round about the second instrument go-ahead. Things almost seem to be going too well and when that happens you half expect something to happen. If the only news to come out of Kourou is good news I think that we’ll survive. Tomorrow that tens column is going to flip down from “4” to “3” and suddenly that launch is going to feel awfully close.

A few days ago I got a message from my publisher asking if I would be interested in writing a book on “The Physics of cricket”. It sounds like a fun project. I wonder if something will come of it. He has just published a book on the Physics of Rugby.

Today a second instrument has passed its tests and pre-launch review. The third and final instrument tests on Monday. Everything that we are hearing from Kourou suggests that things are going well there. After years of problems, difficulties, set-backs and delays as engineers attempted to solve the myriad problems of designing and constructing what is by far the biggest and most complex telescope ever sent into space, it is rather odd to go into fast forward mode. Over the last six months there have been no significant delays, just solid progress. Preparations of Herschel and Planck are nearing completion. The Herschel mirror has been cleaned, ready for launch and is protected by an impermeable cover in the clean room at Kourou.

Once the tests in Kourou finish the two satellites will be fuelled-up. Herschel will be in a very unstable orbit that will need constant correction to keep it on station at Lagrange. Its orbital period will be 6 months, but approximately once a month the thrusters will be used to make tiny corrections. Without them, Herschel will slowly drift away from Lagrange ending up lost in space.

For us, next week is a critical one. Today we had our final preliminary meeting. Everyone gave a “go” for the tests to commence. There seems to be a quiet confidence in the team that we are ready and up for the challenge. Hopefully this will not be shown to be overconfidence and false optimism. We need to get a good start; if we can do that everything else should be smooth going. Success breeds confidence. People have spent months hunting and fixing bugs; now it is time for them to see the fruits of their labours.

Today the storm has passed and the weather is again spring-like. Tomorrow promises to be sunny, but somewhat windy. We will see if we can cope. Tomorrow’s match is essentially a friendly one: in May we will have genuinely competitative action for the first time and it may not be a pretty sight. Avoiding looking ridiculous will be a triumph in itself. We meet at 9 tomorrow morning for the drive to the course.

This week I have gone to bed with Bruce Willis one night, “Omens” another and James Bond another couple. Tonight it’s Eragon: enjoyable, but not a classic. I may not have the patience to see it through to the end – give me Harry Potter any day – and may, instead, slope off with the Stainless Steel Rat and read in bed for a while. In fact, that seems like a good idea.

That Herschel Penguin

Today there was a relaxed and distended atmosphere. Having things going well does help a lot. Among other things, some of the finest minds in European space research were involved in the problem of how to add a skiing penguin to my graphic of manning levels for the simulations next week (See Tuesday’s entry). In the end this problem was resolved and the result placed on the noticeboard, although one or two people noticed that the penguin is in danger of crashing. I am not sure why this issue of adding the penguin was so important!

The other thing that caused ribald laughter today was the t-shirt question. It seems that on high we have been remembered and that some goodie-bags are being prepared for us with Herschel souvenirs. Everyone has to declare their t-shirt size. Intelligence says that the shirts are on the small side so we have been recommended to go for one size larger than normal. This has led to some unusual situations and a lot of debate. I decided to go for an XL, on the grounds that even if it fits like a tent, it is better to have one that is too big rather than too small. Someone else on the team who used to an (almost) Olympic-standard swimmer, but is now big enough to frighten even Big Arnie Schwarzenegger should they meet in a dark alley, has also gone for an XL. Now one of us has got their request terribly wrong somewhere. We did notice though that almost all of the Herschel men are claiming to be “XL”: not sure if there is a subliminal macho message there somewhere.

After last night’s debacle trying to practice for Saturday’s golf match, it is evident that we did the right thing. There was heavy snow around the golf course last night and this morning, after a rather wild night, the hills around us were white with snow, something that rarely happens. This morning was not as tough as last night (which got scary at times) but, riding home this evening, my clothing was smattered with hail. Having worked out that my speedometer/kilometre counter will only work if it is mounted the right way around on the wheel (duhhhh!) I now know that my route to work and back is 8.30km each way and that I am cruising typically at 25-30km/h on the flat… about what a rider in the Tour de France averages on the toughest mountain stages.

We have decided that we will make a last attempt to practice tomorrow night… if not, we are going to get seriously humiliated by NASA: in fact, even practicing we are going to get humiliated by NASA.

Tonight, as I have been writing this Blog, I have been watching one of my favourite films – Men in Black.  Wonderful. Before watching the film for the first time I never suspected that Sylvester Stallone, Newt Gingrich, Dennis Rodman and Michael Jackson are all aliens. Mind you, it makes sense! The second washing machine has ended and has been hung out to dry. The kitchen is now clear. Time to send this and off to bed with Harry Harrison and the Stainless Steel Rat!

A lot has been happening. First of all a lot of quiet checking has been going on about the launch status of Herschel. Pre-flight check-out is going extraordinarily well. At present we are 5 days ahead of schedule and looking in great shape. Unless something unexpected happens, Herschel will be ready to launch on time. That is not to say that there is no possibility of a delay: a launch is so complex that it can be delayed for any one of thousands of different reasons – it is hardly something for the nervous to take part in a launch campaign.

While the specialists in Kourou are getting the Ariane 5 launcher, Herschel and Plank ready for launch a lot of work is going on getting systems ready to handle the data when it comes down. Astronomers will only be aware of the huge network that gets their data to them from the satellite if it should go wrong somewhere. Our job is to try to ensure that it is as robust as possible and does not go seriously wrong. Over the last few weeks the main concern has been to get the launch version of the software ready. This is a huge and exceptionally complex package that includes:

• All the software for astronomers to prepare proposals to use Herschel,
• Software to handle and process those proposals,
• Software to plan how the approved observations will be carried out by Herschel,
• Software to receive and distribute the data from the satellite,
• Software to process all the data that comes down – both the observations for the astronomers and the telemetry that tells the Instrument Control Centres what the health of their instruments is,
• Software to archive the data so that it can be retrieved and studied long after the helium has run out,
• And numerous “bells and whistles” (as our software developers call them) – all kinds of additional refinements that are necessary to run Herschel.

Some of this software has been used and thoroughly tested for a long time. A lot of it, particularly for data distribution and data processing, is new. It all goes through stage after stage of rigorous testing but, inevitably, the only real test is to throw it to the wolves – that is, real astronomers, who will always find ways to break it that we have never dreamed of. The reason is quite obvious: it is one thing to use software in a carefully controlled way following standard procedures, but astronomers will try it out in imaginative and unexpected ways with all kinds of data. This means that we have to make the software extremely robust, quite apart from finding and fixing the hundreds of bugs that any sophisticated piece of software will have, however carefully it is written. Bugs come in all shapes and sizes from the little irritations that can be got around to the worst kind, known as “showstoppers” because, unless fixed, the show will not go on. A major software release starts by preparing an initial version that seems to work; this is a release candidate. The release candidate is checked out in system testing and any show-stoppers are identified and studied. Until showstoppers are found and fixed the software is not deemed suitable even for further testing. Only when the showstoppers are fixed and the system testing is successful does a release candidate become a release and goes through extensive testing. Over the last three weeks we have gone through a series of release candidates. Finally, number four has turned out to pass all the initial checks and will now be worked on intensively. From here we will look for second-level bugs and fix them, issuing patches until we have a version of the software that we are happy with. This will then be frozen for launch.

The Videocon with the Instrument Specialists this afternoon confirmed that after a very nervous two weeks spectacular progress has been made in the last 7 days. Whereas last week we were seriously concerned that we might not have the software in a suitable state to use for the Simulations Campaign next week, now everyone is convinced that it is ready to go. The Videocon was positive and almost all good news.

Less successful was our attempt to get some vital practice in for our golf match v NASA on Saturday. Four of our team turned up at the course this afternoon to be greeted by a strong gale and hail. There was fresh snow on the hills behind. After spending some 20 minutes warming up – if you can call it that when the temperature is 6 degrees and dropping fast and there is driving rain and hail – a new and very intense shower sent us scurrying for cover. After a few minutes debate, we decided that even we were not mad enough to try and practice in such awful conditions and gave up. We will try again on Friday evening.

Although it was not raining at work when I rode home finally, there was a strong wind. In the morning I was riding up hill into a stiff breeze. This evening I had a gale either in my face or as a crosswind. Several times it became difficult to stay upright. The long climb up the last few kilometres became a painful crawl in low gear and it was a relief to do it in daylight: in the dark it would have been nerve-wracking. Right now it is late and I can hear heavy rain outside. The ride to work in the morning may be fun…

Today started in a rather alarming manner and I don’t mean by opening the blinds and seeing rain outside. As I came through the gate I was approached by someone who has a great interest in the success of the Herschel launch, asking me if I knew anything about a serious problem that had cropped up, which could cause a launch delay. This was the first news that I have had that there might be some kind of problem and, asking around, no one had any inkling of anything. It may be that something is going on that is being kept from us – it has happened – but it is also possible that someone has been engaging in Chinese whispers and that this rumour is totally groundless. We are all nervous. We all know how important Herschel is to ESA and how critical it is that the mission go well, so any hint that something is wrong, however tenuous, makes us jumpy. Hopefully tomorrow we will find out that it is all a misunderstanding.

Listening to the news this evening the reality of the outside world hits home night after night. After years of short-term contracts and a salary that was increasing inadequate I am in a secure job (always assuming that nothing terrible happens next month) with a good salary. Millions of people do not have this luck. Just as the crisis has arrived, I have found myself working for an important, prestigious project and, wonder of wonders, in this crisis investment in science and technology is increasing as governments realise for one that investing in technology always gives a high return on investment. We realise just how lucky to be where we are. However, a simple statistic brought home just how cheap the European Space Agency is. The ESA budget is about 3€ per European per year. Just one bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, received funding from the British government to save it from collapse last year equivalent to around 700€ per United Kingdom taxpayer. It reminded me of the US citizen who, after the Mercury programme, wrote to NASA saying “I hear that the Mercury programme cost each American taxpayer 27 cents. Here’s my 27 cents: do it again!”

Today we have had one of those moments of light relief that shows the team spirit that has been built up. Having built up the team rota for the Simulations that start next week, I had, out of curiosity, made a graph of how many people would be on duty for each of the 15 days. In theory it should be a flat, straight line if we really have arranged the rota so that a roughly similar number of people are on duty each day. In fact, the number of people on duty drops progressively both weeks from Monday to Saturday, before ramping up again on Sunday and Monday. Why we should consistently have more people on duty on Sunday than on Saturday is beyond me but, obviously, the Group Leaders who have rostered their teams have their reasons. I was also struck by the way that the number of people on duty each day trended downwards through the two weeks, so the graph got put up on our noticeboard as a curiosity. It was no great surprise that various people started to make their own additions to the graphic (various hands are evident in the additions). The Boss added a trend line pointing sharply downwards and added the comment “no one left at launch?” (does he know something about our contracts????) The best addition though, which left people guffawing with laughter as they passed, was by a certain tall patrician gentleman occasionally mentioned here, who added a cut-out of a skiing penguin to the steep downward slope of the graph. Definitely moral is not a problem here and we do not take ourselves too seriously.

We do a lot of walking round the site during the day. Sometimes it is going to a meeting in another building. Sometimes it is to visit a colleague – like many colleagues, I find face to face meeting to be far better on many occasions than using the telephone. Sometimes it is just for our post-lunch walk. To get to and from our building there are various potential routes however, the most direct takes us up an earth bank that separates two paths. As always happens, the shortcuts that people use become obvious after time as bare, muddy paths [I should add that there is no grass as such, which would be ruinously costly to water in summer; it is all wild grass and weeds that the site gardener is gradually taming by cutting them frequently]. Finally, the site administration has recognised this shortcut and is making it official by installing some concrete steps up the bank. Every time that I have had to pass the construction today I have had to smile: presumably someone has decided that we are risking slipping on the mud and doing ourselves a nasty mischief.

At times today it has been impossible to avoid watching the progress of construction in the carpark. At lunch today we took a closer look at the portacabins. Having spent two years in a similar temporary structure, some team members have a rather jaundiced view of them as they are definitely not ideal accommodation either in very hot or very cold weather, although, if truth be told, they are not as bad as all that. One feature of the construction though is the bars on the windows: looking at the building in its half-finished condition, we did speculate how popular this feature would be with its occupants. There is also a degree of nervousness as to who exactly is going to be put in there. We don’t think that any of our team will be re-located, but the Boss conspicuously failed to answer a direct question on this and we do know that some people are going to be moved around. For the next year or so the pressure on office space is going to increase, before relaxing again as missions start to run down and end.

Preparedness for the mission is slowly ramping-up. Rotas are now being made for the first months of the mission, along with costings of the extra overtime. No one knows exactly how well things will go, so the assumption is that we will work a basic 50 hour week, covering weekends and any public holiday (actually, there probably won’t be any). As we do not know what to expect, we have to be prepared. That means having people available so that we can respond to problems when they happen. Of course, maybe everything will work perfectly and we will not need to work weekends, or extra hours in the week, but no one is exactly holding their breath about it. Things will go wrong. They will go wrong at the worst possible times. And they will need fixing… yesterday and no excuses.

There is still an eerie calm at weekends. It can’t and won’t last much longer. After months of having my mailbox buzzing on a Saturday and Sunday it feels odd to miss checking my mail for several hours and have precisely nothing about Herschel at the end of it. Three months ago, or even a month ago, the volume of email on a weekend was almost as great as during the week. Now, industry is winding-down its efforts after a long period where it ramped-up to a six-day and then to a seven-day week. One can well imagine that the people who have been putting in such exhausting hours are highly relieved just to have got their part of the job done and relax a bit. In contrast, the heat and pressure is on the launch team to meet that April 16^th date at 13:16UT, although the very calm noises and lack of any significant news coming out of Kourou indicates that there is no reason to doubt that they will be ready and have some time in hand.

Outside my window the interesting activity is in the former car park. Having spent over a year in portacabins initially when I arrived before the new building was ready, a new set of portacabins is now being constructed. The site is growing apace and already there is a critical lack of office space again.