Campaign diary on 28 August 2008

The crew had a down day and also some other team members took the afternoon off and visited Yokohama. Pictures and movies ranging from earthquakes to skyline views by Christian will be uploaded to the gallery as soon as someone manages to write a working script for the gallery. The visit of National Geographic was a lot less disturbing than some of the team expected, we only had to tow the Falcon in and out twice. The next chance for a mission is appeared, a week ET event on the weekend. Work on the wind lidar continued with flickers of hope interrupted by severe drawbacks. In addition to the lidar problems that appear to be related to the laser seeding, the scanner control card stopped working, now the third independent problem occuring within 10 days! Rudi, Benni and Martin went to the operations center in the middle of the night to catch someone from Lockheed Martin in Boulder within office hours. If this combination of morning flights, planning with an operations center in Monterey (9h time difference away) and phone calls to Boulder continues, the team will probably never get over jet lag symptons...

Author: Martin W.