Wednesday 30th, January 2002
Karine, Nicolas and Cécile arrived last night and are very happy to be in Kiruna ! The last (hopefully !) cooling-down of the cryostat is in progress. The mirror will be measured tomorrow with Federico who will arrive tonight.

Thursday 31th, January 2002
Nicolas & Co checked the positions of the mirrors, we are now waiting for Alain's conclusions. A flight seems possible for the middle of next week !!! Since we have some time ahead of us, we decided to warm-up the cryostat (once more !) for minor improvements (some more ecosorb on the 1.6 K stage).

Friday 1st, February 2002
On the gondola, we have: cleaned the mirrors, reinstalled the front-baffle, almost finished the genral baffling and the crashpads have been fixed.
The cryostat is cooling-down, once again ! But this time, everything did not go so perfectly, so it really may be the good one !!! Everything is OK now.
Since a flight is highly probable next week (wednesday or thursday), the rest of the "flight team" will arrive sunday evening.

Saturday 2nd, February 2002
The cryostat continues its cooling-down perfectly (400 mK at 23h). Therefore, the team took an almost-day-off: we visited the Ice Hotel (wonderful ... but cold !). On the road, we saw four reindeers and one fox in a foggy black&white landscape. Since it was the day of the Snow Festival in Kiruna, it turned out to be very difficult to find a restaurant with available seats !

Sunday 3rd, February 2002
It was a very special day: baffling, cleaning, He transfert ... The meteorologic previsions are still good from wednesday to saturday. The cryotat is below 100 mK !

Monday 4th, February 2002
Alain, Xavier, Frederic and Cyrille arrived last night. We continue to prepare the instrument for the flight: baffling (encore et encore), gondola balancing and weighting (448 kg !) and many small (but essential) things.

Tuesday 5th, February 2002
Due to various reasons, we cannot fly tomorrow morning, but meteorological conditions should stay OK for a 12-16 hour flight around 4 hPa for thursday and friday. The gondola is installed on the launchpad, everything is ready for a flight in the very near future.

Wednesday 6th, February 2002
Everything is ready for a flight tomorrow at 3.9 hPa (35.8 km), launch scheduled at 12:30 UT (13:30 Paris time).
Many trajectories are available on the dedicated web page.

Thursday 7th, February 2002
All information are gathered on the dedicated web page.

go to the 02-07-2002 ARCHEOPS FLIGHT's page

Friday 8th, February 2002
After the end of the Archeops flight and the successful launch of Archeops2 , it is now time for packaging. Everybody leaves tomorrow morning.
Bye-bye ...