Still Waiting

We're about 2 hours and 20 minutes out. We're bored out of our minds. We've spent a lot of time just figuring out how to bring up several of the monitors around the room. We spent over half an hour puzzling out the sound system so we could hear NASA TV. It's truly a good use of our time ... right?

We did, however, do our voice checks on the voice network. Everything's going smoothly. In the next half hour, we'll watch as the spacecraft powers down the last MRO instrument that needs to be powered down prior to Phoenix EDL, and then I'll do a readiness poll of the various teams on the MRO project to assess our "readiness" to support EDL. All told, aside from any failures, we're as ready as we're going to be for this.

People have started to show up. The project manager came with two bags full of cookies. My good wife sent a big half-sheet cake for consumption later today after Phoenix is on the ground.