Update on Big Burn 15:45 CET

A quick update as of 15:45 CET from the Integral Dedicated Control Room at ESOC on today’s manoeuvre. We remain GO for the burn!

The GO/NOGO meeting this morning at 10:00CET gave a positive decision to ‘go’ for the manoeuvre; the spacecraft, ground stations, ground segment, team and all the needed data products were ready.
The activity today is being done under manual control, so Integral was switched off its (usual) automated timeline at 11:36CET and the Flight Control Team (FCT) are now issuing commands manually, in real time. For example, the command to start slewing (rotating the spacecraft) into the correct attitude for the thruster burn was issued by the team at about 12:08 CET (this ran for 16 mins).
During the burn, Integral’s attitude and orientation will be done using the on-board gyros; these were freshly calibrated earlier this afternoon and are ready.
In addition to the flight control team, specialists from flight dynamics are here to provide support in areas such as mission planning, attitude monitoring and ‘FBK’ – for ‘Fuel Book Keeping’ (like most satellites, Integral has no fuel gage; we estimate how much is left by keeping track of how much gets used for each and every thruster burn during the missions entire life). The FCT and FDyn teams are also preparing commands and data products to be used in the event that the burn is cancelled for any reason.

Integral teams at work 24 January 2015 Credit: ESA

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