Operational Mission
On 21 July 2009, Herschel commissioning was declared successful, allowing the start of the operational phase. A formal handover of the overall responsibility of Herschel was declared from the programme manager Thomas Passvogel to the mission manager Johannes Riedinger.
Herschel will end its mission some time in March 2013, when the observatory's cryogenic superfluid helium runs out. Because Herschel's orbit at the L2 point is unstable, ESA wants to guide the craft on a known trajectory. Two options are under serious consideration by ESA managers:
- Place Herschel into a solar orbit where it could not encounter Earth again for at least hundreds of years.
- Guide Herschel on a course toward the moon for a destructive high-speed collision to search for water. It would take about 100 days for Herschel to reach the moon, depending on which pole is targeted.
Read more about this topic: Herschel Space Observatory
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“Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)