21 Mar 2011 11:20

Spacecraft

The spacecraft continues to be in good health and is operating nominally.

Payload

Instrument operations for PACS, SPIRE and HIFI have been nominal for the entire reporting period, apart from a single event with HIFI.

On 28 February the memory of HIFI's Local Oscillator Control Unit (LCU) was affected in a critical area that is needed for accepting commands, providing telemetry, and for patching defective memory locations. This caused the communication to be lost between the LCU and the Instrument Control Unit. The fact that the LCU was drawing nominal power at the time suggested that it was a single event upset, or bit flip problem.

The only way in which normal instrument operations can be restored from this condition is to power cycle the LCU, which had been powered on continuously since 10 January 2010 when the redundant HIFI signal chain was put into operations. In the worst possible case the resulting power spike on the secondary converter side could have led to the loss of a diode (as had happened when on 2 August 2009 the primary chain was inadvertently power cycled - see the October 2009 status report), and thus to a loss of the instrument. Fortunately the recovery of the instrument proceeded flawlessly and HIFI has resumed nominal operations. The event requires two days of HIFI observations to be rescheduled.

Ground Segment

Ground Segment operations have been nominal and 100% of the data continue to be recovered. As of 4 March 2011, the completion of the different programme parts was:

For more details of these different programme parts, see the "overview of Herschel observing" linked from the right-hand menu.

Mission Operations
During the reporting period, mission operations have been conducted with the support of ESA's New Norcia and Cebreros ground stations. Observational data stored on-board Herschel was received on ground during daily communication passes, each lasting approximately three hours.

Archiving
The ground segment is operating nominally. Data products are generated routinely and ingested into the Herschel Science Archive (HSA).

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Legal disclaimer
This report is based on the Herschel mission manager's report dated 16 March 2011. Please see the copyright section of the legal disclaimer (linked from the home page http://sci.esa.int) for terms of use.