Herschel

JohnMurphy wrote:

Excellent news Brian.

Lets hope it all holds together now for the launch on 14th. There must be great excitement in your camp at this stage.:woohoo:

Fingers crossed and thanks, John! I won't quite believe the May 14th launch date until I see the damn thing on the pad at T-6 seconds, and the go/no go lights are all green! Everyone's just gearing up for the madness of launch and the commisioning phase afterwards. Fun days lie ahead!

Sad to hear that about Spitzer, its done some remarkable work.
Do you know if the Spitzer warm mission is to continue? I know there was previously some disputes as to wether it was worth continuing funding but it can still do some impressive work in the warm state, see ssc.spitzer.caltech.edu/mtgs/warm/wp/001mccarthy.pdf

Anyway - best wishes.

The SWM is most definitely going ahead (which consists of using the 3.6 and 4.6 micron channels of the IRAC camera). Funding for Cycle 6 is assured, and the call for Cycle 7 will be out later this year. Sad to see the end of the cyrogenic mission myself, I've spent more than a fair bit of time with Spitzer spectrographic datasets over the past 6 years. NASA and JPL got a lot of bang for their buck with that mission, to say the least.

Good to hear that the SWM is still on the cards. Theres plenty of life left in Spitzer in this mode.

Fingers crossed for the 14th. Hope it all stays GREEN for liftoff. Best wishes.

Hi everyone.

Just a quick update - final launch processing work on Herschel is scheduled for today ahead of the payload fairing installation tomorrow and roll out on Wednesday. All going well ahead of the launch on Thursday - launch is scheduled for 13:12 GMT. I'll be blogging from the SPIRE Operations Room at the Rutherford Appleton Lab on launch day to provide updates - visit the Herschel blog at herschelmission.wordpress.com and on Twitter: twitter.com/astroboh .

A web feed of the launch will be available from www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html . The details will be available on the web itself a couple of days before the launch.

Those with satellite TV can also pick up the ESA feed for launch. The settings are:

Here are the parameters for AB3 test channel which will carry the HP launch TX on 14th.

AB3: @ 5°West
Downlink frequency: 12,543 MHz
Polarity: horizontal
SR: 27500 Ms/s
FEC: 3/4
Pal / 9 MHz Mpeg 2 DVB (4:2:0) in the clear Audio channel : GCPE 2
audio PIDs open

Final details will be published on television.esa.int .

Fingers crossed - wish us luck!

Clears skies!

Brian

Hi everyone - just a reminder that launch day is almost upon us! Launch is set for 2:12pm Irish time - updates (blogs from French Guiana and the Rutherford Appleton Lab, where I'll be tomorrow) can be found at the Herschel and Planck blogs:

herschelmission.wordpress.com/
planckmission.wordpress.com/

ESA TV and Arianespace will also be covering the mission live:

www.esa.int/SPECIALS/herschelplanck/SEM9V3ZVNUF_0.html
www.videocorner.tv/videocorner2/live_flv/index.php?langue=en

Herschel is now at the pad.... fingers crossed!

Brian

Live ESA feed from Darmstadt (mission control):

www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Operations/SEM6G9ZVNUF_0.html

Good Luck Brian!