ESA HST team SM4 mission status report: what happens during a “planning shift”

HST SM4 Status Report 4:
HST SM 4: Planning Shift - Flight Day 5, 6
A servicing mission calls for 24-hour support and the ESA Hubble team has been diligent since flight day 1. Splitting into two 12-hour shifts, the ESA team members work either on the “orbit shift” (03:00 - 15:30) or the “planning shift” (15:00 - 03:30). So whether they are morning people or a night people, it matters little since they get some of both during their shifts.
The ESA HST team during shift handover. Michael Eiden (far left) and Udo Rapp (far right) work the orbit shift, while Lothar Gerlach (second from left) and Manfred Schmid (middle) work the planning shift.
During the planning shift, the astronauts are in their sleep period and functional verification testing is being carried out from ground on HST’s newly installed/repaired instruments and spacecraft subsystems. The point of the functional tests is to validate the correct performance of the HST hardware after repair. When anomalies have occurred during the orbit shift, their impact is being assessed and where necessary, a planning update for the next day’s orbit shift with corrective actions is being defined. Whenever ESA hardware is involved, the team ...