Everything is looking good so far on the launch of the Herschel Space Observatory together with Planck. Lift-off occurred at 15:12 (Dutch time) and the module is currently at 170 km above Earth’s surface and still climbing fast. There’s still a long time to go before we know if Herschel will actually work correctly, but the first couple of minutes at least went very well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 14:05 and is filed under Science: Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.