“Our Simulations Officers are very good at finding potential weak points,” says EarthCARE Flight Operations Director, José Morales. “This team is excellent, but young, for example. So, they were forced to handle an issue while their experienced team leader was kept out of the action. What they face during the simulation campaign will likely be far worse than anything they encounter on launch day. But in spacecraft operations, we hope for the best and plan for the worst.”

Effective communication is essential on launch day. The ESA teams must work seamlessly with those from partners such as the Japanese space agency, JAXA, who developed EarthCARE’s Cloud Profiling Radar.

To this end, a delegation of JAXA engineers and team leaders joined their ESA colleagues in the Mission Control Team for the simulations campaign and will support the operations of their instrument in real time during the Launch and Early Orbit Phase. As part of the simulation campaign, the teams rehearsed the problem-solving steps that they would go through if something were to go wrong during the deployment of the radar’s 2.5-metre reflector dish.