Dress Rehearsal

The Dress Reheasal is an overall rehearsal of the countdown as it will take place at L-0 (Launch day). It starts 9 hours before the launch. The virtual launch today was planned at 14:00 Kourou time. Then, the dress rehearsal started today at 5:00 am. An early wake up for some of the team members to make the first connection with ESOC (Germany).
There are many centres involved in the coundown rehearsal as showed by the list below:
In CSG (French Guiana):

• Jupiter II (Control Center)
• LBC-1 (The place where all the MSG-3 data are monitored)
• CDL-3 (Centre de Lancement-3/Launch Center)
• Meteo/Weather forecast station

 In Darmstadt (Germany):

• ESOC
• EUMETSAT

...and all stations (under ESOC control) required to track the spacecraft trajectory after orbit injection:

• Malindi or Melinde (Kenya)
• Perth (Australia)
• Maspalomas (Spain)
• Kourou (French Guiana)

Here below a picture at the LBC-1 @ 07:26 am (29/06/2012)

An overall external view of the Jupiter building

General overview inside the control room inside Jupiter

A close up on the "MSG-3 corner"

On the foreground from left to right: Francois (ESA), Jean-Claude, Christian (EUMETSAT)
On the background: Stéfane (ESA), Denis (Thales), and Béatrice (Arianespace)
Then, back to LBC-1...
At 16:48 , Kourour time, i.e.12 minutes before lift-off! all lights are "green" in the LBC-1.

00:00.00 : launch time. Fortunately nothing happened today :-)
However, the simulation carries on with the mission of the launcher till the separation of MSG-3 and Echostar-17 spacecrafts from the launcher. This lasts about 30 minutes. Done.
Another usefull and succesfull day.