This was a pretty exciting week. It peaked on Wednesday when the GLAST satellite, a space-based gamma ray observatory, was launched into orbit. I was sitting the in weekly BaBar physics meeting, and unable to go watch the launch with my GLAST colleagues in the main auditorium I pulled up NASA TV and watched the launch on my laptop. I promise that I **was** paying attention to the BaBar physics presentations; I was, in fact, left in charge of the meeting so I was pulling mental double-duty. Right brain for GLAST, left brain for BaBar. 🙂
I captured some images of my desktop before and during the launch. The “during” pictures aren’t all that great…. after all, a rocket launch looks like a ball of flame and smoke. The launch was actually something of a nail-biter. It had already been delayed by a week, and many GLAST collaborators who had flown to Florida to watch it came back disappointed. In tough money times like this, it’s hard to bounce back and forth from CA to FL, so I can’t imagine too many people tried to do that.
The countdown was proceeding fine on Wednesday. However, everybody knew that the launch was still tenuous, since the good weather window was closing rapidly. Even a short launch delay would push the launch into the possibility of bad weather, which would force it to be delayed again. At around 8:45 PDT, the countdown clock stopped with just four minutes left. I Skyped Jodi to find out what was going on; she was sitting in the Panofsky auditorium, watching the launch on a big screen with a packed room of other viewers. She told me that a weather station hadn’t reported in, so they paused the launch to re-establish contact. Then, there was something going on with the rocket itself, but it wasn’t serious so they restarted the countdown at about twelve minutes.
This twelve minute countdown put the GLAST launch within just a few minutes of the close of the weather window. This time, there were no more delays. The launch went off beautifully, and all I got to see was an orange and white blaze on my tiny RealPlayer window. It was terribly exciting, and with only my tiny NASA TV window and no sound, I was left wondering if it made it into space or not.
Luckily, Jodi kept typing little updates about the rocket status, including its first stage separation. I was relieved and thrilled to hear that GLAST arrived safe and sound in space, and the GLAST operations and science teams could now go into full gear.
These are exciting times. The Large Hadron Collider and GLAST are the next generation of physics experiments which will open new windows on the extreme frontiers of the subatomic and the cosmic. What more could a physicist want?
