National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Today I saw the list of the first objects that I’ll be looking at once I get into space. There’s a group of scientists from Japan and the United States that make up the Astro-E2 Science Working Group. This group has drawn up a list of objects that they want me to look at during the first 7 months I’m in orbit. These are objects they want to make sure I have a chance to look at, and objects that will help to complete my calibration.

There’s supernova remnants, active galaxies, black holes (like Cygnus X-1), and unusual stars. Lots of great stuff! I’m even going to get to help follow up gamma ray bursts observed by the Swift mission!

This makes all this work sooo worth it!

The long pump down continues. The Goddard team is done here for now and has left. Juli is at ISAS (the Japanese Space Agency facility outside of Tokyo) where they are are beginning the steps for putting the electronic boxes on the spacecraft. These electronic boxes control the various cooling stages for me, and take the data I generate while observing. But before that, various wiring harnesses are installed and checked. So things will be quiet here again until about mid-July, when most of the Goddard team will come back to perform tests on me, and actually install the electronic boxes on the spacecraft.

Oh, before he left, Rich Kelley, who is in charge of the Goddard team, gave me this picture. It’s the satellite that will take me into space! The people in the picture are getting it ready while people here are getting me ready. I’ll be put on it later this summer.

Well, I’ve been pumping down for a couple days now. They hooked up all the vacuum hoses to the neon dewar and starting pumping the air out. They did it real slow, taking about six hours to get down to a pressure of 1 Torr. Atmospheric pressure is 760 Torr, so it’s not a bad vacuum. They do this because the filters are very delicate, and pumping down too fast could break them. Then they just keep pumping to get as much water vapor out as they can. Scott warned me this will take a while – like a month!

But they did the first leak check today. It was pretty elaborate as they checked various parts of the dewar. They had to make a few minor adjustments, but everything looks OK.