National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Well, it looks like the launch will have to wait a little longer. After last week was so warm and sunny, a storm blew in just when we needed a clear day! Rats.

Here’s a picture from today. The white spot over the water is the weather balloon that they sent up to check the winds. It swirled up and down alot!

Last night they had a meeting and decided that the weather wasn’t great, but not too bad, so they gave a “GO” for the launch preparations. So everyone got up early this morning to go through the countdown procedures. But they kept meeting all day, and decided around 8:45 AM that the weather wasn’t going to work for launch. The forecast doesn’t look good for tommorow, so they’ll try again on Friday (let’s see, that’s Thursday night for EDT in the U.S.). In the mean time, the Goddard folks will be monitoring the amount of liquid Helium in my tank to make sure it doesn’t need to be topped of before then. (I think they’ll also be catching up on sleep!)

Don’t worry… I’ll be launching soon! We still have another 9 days that could be launch day. And then another couple of weeks at the end of the month. See, they’re prepared for this!

They’re still pumping down my helium. Just one more day to go. I can’t believe it… it’s taken so long to get here, and I’m about to go up into space. I can’t wait to start looking at all of the things they want me to see, like black holes and active galaxies and other cool stuff. I’ve looked at x-rays on Earth, but I can only imagine how incredible it’ll be in space.

As soon as the cryo team is done with my helium dewar, they’ll pull out the plumbing and the rocket team can bolt the cover over that access hole. Then I’ll be sealed up and ready to roll for launch. They’ll be closing all of the other access holes they have on the rocket for other preparations (sometimes I forget that I’m not the only thing on board that needs to get ready for launch).

Here’s another look down from the 8th floor of the launch tower. You can see the turntable and all of the equipment on the launch pad. And there’s a small white box at the edge of the concrete area, which is a camera that will track me during launch.

I got this cool photo of the launch tower. When it’s time to launch, I’ll be rotated out of that blue and white door. You can tell exactly where I’ll launch — check out the damage to that concrete flame deflector! My rocket will blast it and it’ll get even more scorched. I also got a close-up of the giant turntable that will rotate the rocket into position… it even says Astro-E2!

To all my friends in the US, Happy Fourth of July!

We’re getting really close to launch here, and the final preparations are being made. One of the last things that has to be done before I go into space is topping off my dewar full of helium. It’s getting chilly — that helium is 1.3 Kelvin (just over a degree warmer than absolute zero). Since the helium is the outermost layer of the three stages keeping me cold (helium, then neon, then a special refrigerator), it’s really important that the helium lasts a long time. Once the helium is gone, I won’t be cold enough to see x-rays anymore.

So today, the cryogenics team spent six hours adding more helium to the dewar. It’s about 90% full, which should give me three cold years to look at x-rays. Now they’re pumping on the tank to get it ready for launch. Once the pumping is done, they can seal up the openings in the nose fairing and on we go with the launch countdown!

This is a photo of the team that’s topping off the helium. They’re up on the 8th floor of the launch tower, where I am. They go in through that small hole in the nose fairing. I also go this picture of the cover for the hole — it sure does take a lot of bolts to hold that onto the rocket!