15 January 2021, 10h30 AM: we leave the test station

A “test” station is made to… test everything: the devices that will be launched, but also the fluidity of the operations, the organisation of the research teams and the experiments in the labs. Since Wednesday 13 at the end of the day, the ship is full of knowledge, for the scientists, the crew, but also for the mission leaders. It’s all about checking everything… and at the beginning it’s quite laborious! It is a mix of satisfactions (a deployment that goes better than expected), disappointments (a sensor that no longer captures as it should…obviously in the middle of the night), the excitement of the curious (ah! the 1000 questions from the students), the mistakes (tell me, why did you install the air filters at the place of the water filters?), but also several occasions to get fun.

The “test” station is finished, the weather was nice, we ended very tired (the sleepless nights followed one another) and with a lot of things to readjust but… full of optimism because we have the solutions!