Thursday, April 16, 2009

Godspeed Herschel ! [Updated]

[ Udpate: the launch will take place on May 6th]



If you check the Compressive Sensing calendar, you'll see that today is the launch of the Herschel spacecraft. As you know. One of the camera on Herschel has a code implementing a compressive sensing encoding. If I understand correclty, the underlying reason of this late integration in the camera is that CS allows for simple encoding techniques that can be done easily with a normal rad-hard computer. As for any launches they are uncertainties with regards to the weather. As you can see sideways, the spacecraft has been hoisted to the adapter to be put on top of the Ariane 5 rocket. ESA's website also tells us that Herschel has been fueled. Since today is April 16th, the graph showing the launch window (see above) that takes into account all the scientific, technical and orbital constraints, seems to say that the launch window opens in about an hour and will last an hour and 45 minute. Godspeed Herschel.

For more information on Compressive Sensing on Herschel, check this paper by Jerome Bobin, Jean-Luc Starck, and Roland Ottensamer entitled Compressed sensing in astronomy,

and these entries:

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