Campaign diary on 09 September 2008

The targeting mission today went well and the DIAL worked again. Problems may appear again as the cause for the problems yesterday is neither clear nor resolved. For now we are happy with good observations, the flight could have been less cloudy, but overall we're happy with the result.

The important news though is that the wind lidar is finally working again!!! Mark thinks the performance is better than ever before and we could see returns from Mount Fuji, 18 km away (see image)! Enthusiasm develops and in particular Christian Lemmerz pushes the idea of putting the lidar in somehow between the planned missions for the next two days. However, removing the DIAL and installing everything in less than 24 hours seems quite risky. Fortunately, Nakazawa-san agrees to shift the recurvature mission backwards a little and then Sarah and Pat agree to cancel the mission for tomorrow. By this the way would be free to finally have all systems working on Thursday, so much faster than we were hoping before. Well, we seen problems occurring during the system installation before, maybe to early to announce the great success...

Author: Martin W.