Today we switched out the cryostat roughing pumps for turbo pumps in order to go to the next stage in the cryostat pumpout process. After that, Jeff and Kyle installed the SQUID controller boards onto the bottom of the (inverted) cryostat. We also gave an update on our progress on our weekly collaboration telecon -- all before lunch!
After lunch, Jeff and I headed over to the rigging shop to finish our aerial lift, forklift, and fall protection safety courses, which took basically the entire rest of the afternoon. During that time, Kyle gave a tour of our experiment to a group of about 50 10th-grade girls who were visiting CSBF as part of a summer engineering camp at UT Tyler.
After Jeff and I returned from our training session, we found Kyle working on a new timing cable to synchronize the timestamps across all of our bolometer readout boards while Franky and KyleH finished up the last tasks necessary to complete the heatsinking of said readout boards. At the end of the day, the cryostat was pumped down low enough to allow us to leak-check -- and no leaks were found! We will leak check again tomorrow after having allowed the cryostat to pump out even further, but we anticipate no further problems delaying us from cooling the cryostat this weekend.
Also, here's the news clip from KLTV that aired yesterday:
http://www.kltv.com/story/18722584/nasa-funded-experiment-comes-to-etx
And today's pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/104253244018605213307/EBEXInPalestine20120607
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.