Today is the day!
Officially, I don’t work, nor do I get paid for Mondays. I didn’t sleep last night.
At 6:40pm, one of the instrument team guys noticed the wrong data coming down from the spacecraft. I read this at 9:30 and was able to confirm his suspicions and confirm that I was the person who missed this. Technically, two people did, the person who built the commanding and me, the backstop person.
I was so sick to my stomache I couldn’t sleep last night.

This morning, I called boss #1, P and talked to him. We went over the science and the failures. We talked about what went wrong. I really fucked it up. I simply missed this error when reviewing the load. The inner child in me wants to say the silly things "But I had 6 loads to review that week because of the target of opportunity" or "I don’t get it, I always check for this" or "really, P, the dog ate my homework"
Truth is, I need to just suck up and accept that I screwed up and fortunately, only 2 observations were affected and only 1 is unrecoverable.

As Dr. Jay put it, at least I didn’t put the telescope in safe mode, which prevents us from doing any science until we determine the problem and fix it. He did that once. He then listed all of the failures of every main person on our team. Except one person. Although we decided that since he shattered his ankle rock climbing, that should count against him.

So, I spent part of the morning talking to P, feeling like an ass, then helped construct the letter to the observing team that wanted this science and sent it, explaining why they lost 10 kiloseconds of data.

I feel terrible. Add to this that I am really falling into a pretty bad depression, I don’t know how things are going to be right now.

I am not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing that it took me 3 years at this position to blow an observation…