Serjeant

Transcription

Herschel has just launched with Planck and, my God... It's really heart stopping. You work for so long on this mission and it's going up on the top of this big firework and in two minutes it's in space and they're surrounded by explosives and it's years and years of your life and now it's up there. I'm just so relieved, there's no words for it really. What was the most heart-stopping moment for you? It's got to be the launch. As the rockets are taking off from the ground to the first stage separation. By the time of that first stage separation cluster satellites have already blown up and it's really very dangerous because so many things can go wrong. So those first few moments are just terribly dangerous for the mission. And now we're past that so that's great. The next thing is to see whether the instruments work. They worked on the ground and now we've got to find out whether they work in space and it's such a different environment. You never know quite what's been shaken up in the launch. It's a very violent thing, launching, so you never know if the moving parts are all going to work in the same way. But, yeah, fingers crossed. We're not quite out of the woods yet but the worst is over. When will you be out of the woods? When will you be happy? When will I be happy? When we've got the science verification data, performance verification data. We know the instruments are working and we can prove that we can do the science that we want to do with this telescope and the data will come in about September but we'll get early indications before that. So over the course of the next few months or in the next few weeks, we're seeing whether the spacecraft is working, the instruments are working, the electronics are still working So it's all going to happen soon but the worst is over.