Day 75, 8/11/2012 -- Like lotto, you got to be in it to win it

I don't know why that line came into my head -- perhaps it's because I'm quite sleep-deprived, having woken up at about 4:30AM in order to catch my early flight from Minnesota down to Texas. Of course, this means I'm back in Palestine!

A lot has happened in the nearly 3 weeks I've been gone. Many many scans have been made of the source on the water tower, whose data are helping us understand the EBEX optics. The big push right now is to do our "compatibility test" with CSBF to ensure their and our systems play nice with each other. There has been a ton of activity over the past few weeks that I've missed out on, but the gondola itself hasn't changed too much -- the solar panels are now wired up and installed, some components for the liquid cooling system have been mounted, and basically all hardware is in place for compatibility. We're going to try and take some more data in the next couple days and then switch over completely to doing our compatibility test.

Elsewhere, the BLAST team has done their compatibility test and have basically disassembled and packed up their entire experiment. They did, however, implement a fix in their cryostat and are now checking to see if it worked, but it's likely they won't be here for more than about a week.

https://picasaweb.google.com/104253244018605213307/EBEXInPalestine20120811