Monday, August 20, 2012

Day 84, 8/20/2012 -- Gold, Frankincense, and MRR

We finished our compatibility test just in time for the Antarctic LDB Mission Readiness Review, or MRR, this morning. As part of this review, the science payloads going to the ice have presentations on their status and various other issues (personnel, schedules, etc) pertinent to their campaigns. EBEX's review went well, and we fully expect to have no problems once we get to McMurdo (hey, we can dream, right?).

After the MRR, we had a discussion about the remaining outstanding items to test before we disassemble and start packing up the experiment to ship. There is a range of pointing (and especially star camera) related stuff as well as a few smaller receiver/telescope items on the list along with further analysis of our detector array's performance.

One of the items on the list was more time constant measurements -- during our previous measurements, we only took data in our lowest frequency band, so we wanted to extend that up into the higher bands. Also, our previous measurements showed some weirdness so we changed the source modulation to try and figure out the source of the problem. It turns out that changing the modulation from an electrical chop of our narrowband source to a mechanical chop of the source with an interrupter wheel made it so we could make measurements at all three bands simultaneously! The data from this test look promising.

As part of this test, I had to climb up and down the gondola quite a bit, and at this point I'm getting pretty good at it.

No pictures today.

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