EBEX in Flight

Day 16, 04/14/2011 -- G.I. Joe kung fu gripper

2011-04-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Today, we again attacked the problem of the HWP not rotating. We tried a few different things, like hitting the suspect gripper with tons of current and tilting the cryostat to different angles. Still, despite our best efforts, we have yet to find a solution. We do feel we have a better idea of which gripper is not working, and there are some things we can try tomorrow when we go in.

Franky has finished setting up the BROs; tomorrow we plan on connecting cables and cycling the fridges so we can start doing detector work.

Pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110414

Day 15, 04/13/2011 -- Something is rotten in the state of Texas

2011-04-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

Rotten is perhaps too strong a word. Basically, when you do experimental physics, things often don't work. It's part of the simultaneous charm and frustration of doing new things.

In this case, we are having trouble with the "grippers", a set of three motor-controlled jaws that hold the half-wave-plate in place as the cryostat cools down. Despite repeated testing in another cryostat and Jeff's careful assembly, we have yet to succeed in opening the grippers and releasing the HWP. We still have a few things to try tomorrow, so hope is far from lost. Even if the HWP isn't free to rotate, we still have plenty of other tests that need to be done, both without and eventually with the gondola, so we are forging ahead.

While the UMN crew tackled the gripper problem, Franky kept himself busy with continuing to assemble and populate the BROs. At this point, we're just waiting for the detectors to be cold enough that we can start connecting cables and doing the baseline checkout tests.

After Jeff and I went in at 4:30 AM for a helium transfer, the boiloff rate is now slowing down and will likely last through the night -- a good sign that we are close to being able to run the fridges and detectors.

Pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110413

Day 14, 04/12/2011 -- At last, helium.

2011-04-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

With the arrival of Franky from McGill yesterday, today he set about setting up the bolometer readout crates (hereafter: BROs). After first assembling the final crate, he identified and fixed a power issue related to a bent pin that caused us to damage 2 (very expensive) readout boards back in Minnesota. The main problem he and Kyle were having was failure to communicate -- no, not because of his Quebecois accent, but because they were having network problems between the computers and the BROs. In the end it turned out to be something misconfigured in one of our network switches, but it took a half day to figure out what the problem was and how to fix it.
In the meantime, Kyle, Jeff, and I started thinking about some of the upcoming calibration experiments -- how to mount a source on the water tower and be able to aim it, how to suspend a styrofoam bucket with LN2 above the cryostat window, etc. One of the outcomes of this discussion was a nice little mount based on a benchtop optical mount, a spare hexapod clevis, and a piece of scrap aluminum. This mount, an inverted altitude-azimuth mount destined for holding our millimeter-wave source atop the water tower, will allow us to map the beams of the telescope once the gondola gets here.

But the main advance of the day was helium, and lots of it. We finally got our gas regulator from Minnesota and could proceed with cooling down the cryostat with liquid helium. After pumping out most of the LN2 from the helium tank and then boiling off the little that remained with warm nitrogen gas, we then proceeded to transfer liquid helium out of one of the large 500L storage dewars we ordered. In the end we used about 250L of helium to cool and completely fill the EBEX cryostat's 130L helium tank. Because the optics box and focal planes inside are isolated from the 4K cryostat shell, they still need to cool down, and as they do, they boil off massive amounts of liquid helium. Thus, for the next few days, we'll be doing multiple fills a day, at all hours of the day or night -- Jeff and I are scheduled for a fill at about 3AM, and there will probably be another stupidly early/late fill tomorrow as well. Ah, the joys of having a big cryostat!

Pictures, again, finally:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110412

Day 13, 04/11/11 -- This Blog Entry Intentionally Left Blank

2011-04-11T20:41:00.000-07:00

Day 12, 04/10/11 -- Tippecanoe and Tyler Too

2011-04-10T20:31:00.000-07:00

Today was a slow day. With the cryostat filled with liquid nitrogen and the internals slowly cooling, there's not much that requires immediate attention. Since it's Sunday we went into the high bay only for a short period of time today -- long enough to check the liquid nitrogen levels (and refill as needed) and for Jeff to open and close the internal mechanical heatswitch to try and optimize its thermal contact.

We then drove to Tyler, TX to see what it was all about. A city of over 80,000 people, we figured it must have something worthwhile, right? Turns out we were right: Jeff found that they have a zoo and a historical aircraft and aviation museum. We went to the Caldwell Zoo first, and were treated with a surprisingly nicely maintained and well-curated zoo, with all manner of big cats (lions, white tigers, leopards, and cheetahs), a couple of black bears, and some large mammals from both the US and Africa (rhinos, giraffes, and elephants) along with the requisite reptile area (which focused mostly on species native to the area) and a nice contingent of water and tropical birds.

The aviation museum was also quite a find. Located at the Tyler airport, they have a nice collection of aviation-related memorabilia from the entire history of the US armed forces as well as a nice collection of real (but mostly engineless) aircraft sitting on the tarmac (an F-101, F-105, F-111, and an F-4 Phantom come to mind immediately out of the 10 or so aircraft they had). They also had knowledgeable and helpful docents on hand to answer questions about the aircraft, which was a nice bonus. And all for $5! Highly recommended if you're ever in Tyler.

The only pictures from today are some cell phone pictures of pelicans, so I'm not going to bother. Tomorrow we're back in the high bay, and are planning our first of many liquid helium transfers!

Day 11, 04/09/11 -- The Birth of Cool

2011-04-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

We spent a half day in the high bay today getting the cryostat ready to cool with liquid nitrogen. Jeff and I worked on getting electronics boards mounted to the bottom of the cryostat as well as connecting their cables inside the metallic 'can' that sits at the bottom of the cryostat. Kyle meanwhile worked on getting the cryostat housekeeping (temperature sensors, heaters, and current monitors) up and running.

After installing cables and the RF can, we flipped the cryostat upright to begin the cooldown. The liquid nitrogen tank obviously holds liquid nitrogen, but we pre-cool the liquid helium tank with liquid nitrogen as well. Liquid nitrogen has a much higher heat capacity and is much less expensive than liquid helium, so we use LN2 to get us from 300K to 77K first, and then fill with LHe. That process went quite smoothly despite (or perhaps because?) the cryogen vendor gave us high pressure (250 psi!) LN2 tanks instead of the 22psi ones we requested. At any rate, it worked, and Kyle got the housekeeping system up and running after some minor wiring tweaks to account for some changes inside the cryostat.

After leaving the high bay, Kyle headed back to our lodgings while Jeff and I decided to take a bike ride. It turns out that not only is the Palestine area quite pretty as we've noticed since being here, with lots of trees and green fields, but the Texas drivers were surprisingly accommodating of two guys riding skinny-tired bikes on the farm roads and state highways. On the smaller roads, drivers without fail gave us a wide berth, and we were not once honked at from someone behind us (one guy in town coming the opposite way honked at us for some unknown reason...or perhaps he was honking at someone else). Also, Palestine's hills are surprisingly painful for someone (me) who hasn't done any real riding since last October in Minneapolis (which is largely flat). Still, the 14 miles we did today was a good start -- hopefully we'll have a chance to do some longer rides in the future.

The few pictures today were taken with my cell phone, as my DSLR's memory card was left in the apartment. Sorry.
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110409

Day 10, 04/08/11 -- Leak free

2011-04-09T06:31:00.000-07:00

Whoops, sorry for the late update.

Because we had a late night on Thursday and have been working pretty much all day every day, we took our first (mostly) day off. The only thing we did in the high bay was leak-checking the cryostat. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that we forgot to bring an inert gas regulator with us to Palestine. We managed to borrow one from the other science group (CREAM) that is in the high bay adjacent to ours.

Planning to attach cables, flip the cryostat, and fill with LN2 today.

No photos from Friday because there wasn't anything interesting to take pictures of...

Day 9, 04/07/11 -- Closing Time

2011-04-07T21:46:00.000-07:00

After a long day, we got the cryostat closed and pumping! It's late and I want to go to bed so no detailed update tonight, but everything went pretty smoothly. Hopefully it won't have a leak -- fingers crossed!

Pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110407

Day 8 , 04/06/11 -- Just talkin' 'bout shaft

2011-04-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

Another day, another few steps closer to getting the cryostat closed and pumping. We pulled the instrument out of the cryostat for the final time so that Jeff could finish installing the parts for the half-wave-plate assembly.

Jeff spent a large fraction of the day inside the cryostat. We had a little scare early in the day as Jeff was installing part of the HWP drive shaft assembly -- it got dropped on the floor, bending two of the flexible bellows in the process. After a brief moment of panic, Jeff realized he actually had spares for the parts in his parts bin, so after a quick replacement we were back on our way. After that, the wiring for the HWP system was installed and tested. The last piece of the puzzle was measuring positions of the angle encoder components on the HWP assembly so we can later infer the HWP's angle relative to the rest of the cryostat and, by extension, the sky.

I spent much of the day working on getting our optical filter, made of porous Teflon, ready to mount. This filter, which helps protect the 1 Kelvin optics from the thermal radiation from the relatively warm (~30K) rotating HWP, is a new addition for this cryostat run.

Kyle spent a lot of the day working on getting our computer network set up, which he did with the help of Milligan back in Minnesota and the CSBF networking person. He also started getting our vacuum leak checker, which arrived today from Minnesota, set up. Kyle and I both helped Jeff where we could, as he had the most difficult work for today.

Pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110406

Day 7, 04/05/11 -- Tape'n'tape

2011-04-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

Today was a productive day in the high bay. Jeff started installing the half-wave-plate motor driveshaft assembly and made a lot of progress in putting together the 'table' assembly that holds the entire HWP system.

Kyle and I measured the polarizing grid orientation relative to the rest of the optics and then we started installing the shielding that protects the detectors from seeing relatively warm 4.2K radiation from the cryostat walls.

This process involves a lot of tape. Aluminum foil tape, to be precise. Sure, the shielding is screwed down, but all of the little gaps between parts need to be closed off with tape. It's a pretty tedious job, as there are a lot of seams, and some of the seams are tough to reach or have non-trivial geometry that makes them difficult to cover with tape. Still, we do our best, and the process takes a few hours to do well.

Once the instrument was all taped up, we got the CSBF guys to come in and crane the instrument over and into the cryostat. Once we got it in place, Kyle spent the rest of the day aligning the last optical element in the cryostat, the so-called "field" lens. In the meantime, I helped Jeff as much as I could, doing little things that needed to be done while he fussed with tiny bearings for the driveshaft assembly.

Tomorrow will be devoted mostly to HWP system installation (finishing the driveshaft, installing/connecting wires, and then installing the HWP system itself). The hope is we can close up and start pumping on the cryostat on Thursday.

Pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110405

Day 6, 04/05/11 -- Lens Alignment: Chaotic Neutral?

2011-04-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

Today was mostly devoted to finishing the alignment process Kyle started in the optics box. We fixed our mechanical overconstraint as mentioned yesterday, but we were still getting unreliable results from our lens alignment procedure. We finally realized that we actually had to rethink part of the process: we were trying to align to something that had too many interdependent parameters. Once we picked a different reference point to align to, the process went more smoothly. Kyle also installed and aligned the polarizing grid in the optics box, so now all of the 1 Kelvin optics are done.

In the meantime, Jeff continued to work on the cold wiring and assembly of the half-wave-plate assembly. One issue that came up was trying to figure out how best to understand the position of the HWP relative to the rest of the cryostat. The HWP rotates, but at any given point in time you need to know its orientation to some known coordinate system so you can figure out the polarization on the sky. It turns out that this isn't a trivial task, but we came up with a procedure for measuring the position of the HWP assembly relative to the outside of the cryostat that should work. We spent a lot of time verifying that this procedure was robust by making many test measurements and checking their repeatability.

Last, I appear to have hurt myself. I must have done something to my ankle while running the past couple of days (Friday and Sunday) and I'm now walking around (slowly) with a noticeable limp. I'm sure it wasn't helped by having to climb up and down ladders in order to make measurements. Hopefully with ice and compression, it will get better by itself in a couple of days...fingers crossed!

Photos:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110404

Day 5, 04/05/11 -- Lazy Sunday

2011-04-03T20:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, it wasn't really a "lazy sunday" -- we still went in to the high bay, but only after a proper breakfast and we "only" stayed 9 hours.

Kyle spent all day doing cold optics alignment. Normally, this wouldn't take all day, but for some reason Kyle was having a lot of trouble with one lens in the optics box. after scratching our heads for a bit, we realized that the alignment scheme was mechanically overconstrained, which we theorize was leading to strange twists in the lens mount structure. We have removed the overconstraint and are going to tackle the alignment again in the morning.

Meanwhile, I finished up replacing the connectors on Jeff's feedthrough wiring and potted them in epoxy (this time after sealing up the back of the connector with a silicone conformal coating to prevent a repeat of last time). Jeff meanwhile replaced components in the top optics stack of the cryostat. We have one new thermal filter from our collaborators at Cardiff and we hope to have a second in time for the closing of the cryostat. These filters are of a new design that should lead to lower helium boiloff in the cryostat -- always a good thing. Jeff also started work on replacing some half-wave-plate system wiring that lives at 4 Kelvin to account for changes made since the last time the HWP was inside the cryostat.

On a non-science note, Jeff and I have found that the big circular launch pad at CSBF makes for a nice running track. We're clearly not the first to think of this, since the road around the pad is already marked with distance indicators. But since I've decided that I'm going to try and improve my running while here in Palestine (in lieu of my usual physical activities), I decided to get a baseline today. I ran the 1.2 mile loop in 8:20, which corresponds to a 6:57 mile -- way faster than I thought I could run a mile! I'll keep you updated on how I improve (or not) throughout our time in Palestine.

No pictures today, since there was really nothing new worth taking pictures of compared to yesterday. Make sure to check out yesterday's pictures, though, if you missed them (since I added them this morning).

Day 4, 04/02/11 -- Epoxy, for example

2011-04-02T21:10:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn't realized, yesterday's post was a (lame) April Fool's joke. The Helium-10 fridge is fine, and everything is moving along.

Yesterday's update was basically more progress on all fronts. Kyle continued to put the instrument together, I finished the housekeeping wiring feedthrough wire replacement and made a new charcoal getter for the cryostat while Jeff finished soldering his wiring. Like much of our wiring, Jeff potted the connectors, which means he encapsulated the wires at the back of the connectors with epoxy (in this case, Stycast 2850FT, an alumina-filled epoxy designed for relatively high thermal conductivity and a metal-like thermal expansion coefficient) in order to prevent wires from moving and shorting together. We typically use the 2850FT resin with a low-viscosity catalyst, which is great for getting the epoxy to flow between wires, around contacts, and into the nooks and crannies (sort of like an english muffin) of the mold. Unfortunately for Jeff, the connectors he used on one end of his wiring, for some reason, had somewhat loose contacts, and the epoxy flowed around them and into the front face of the connector, rendering it unusable.

Today we decided to cut off the bad connectors and replace them. Luckily, unlike most of the connectors in the experiment, these particular connectors (25-pin D-subminiature connectors, the ubiquitous DB-25) are common and we were able to get replacements from the local Radio Shack. These connectors seem to have much more firmly-embedded contacts, so we don't expect the same problem to occur.

On other fronts, Kyle continued with the instrument -- he finished up making all of the sub-Kelvin thermal connections and we started on the process of optics alignment. This is a tricky task with tight tolerances: 0.005" in translation and 0.1 degree in angle. In order to measure these distances, we use a neat tool called a Microscribe MX, which is an articulated arm used to measure locations of...basically anything. That process continues.

In the meantime, I worked on some internal cryostat wiring while Jeff removed the components in the so-called "optics stack" of the instrument, which holds various optical filters and components, in preparation for upcoming alignment tasks.

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera's memory card and card reader in the high bay, so I have no pictures from today (I only took a few anyway). You'll have to make do with the pictures from yesterday that I didn't upload. I'll edit tomorrow with the link to today's pictures.

Yesterday's pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110401

EDIT: Today's pictures:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110402

Day 3, 04/01/11 -- Tragedy

2011-04-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

This is not good.

We needed to move something out of the way (the 150 lb flat bottom lid used when transporting our cryostat) so we foolishly decided to use the crane ourselves. After we had lifted the lid and as we started moving it to the other end of the high bay, the tag line for controlling the load broke and the lid swung over and hit the instrument.

It ended up putting a crack in one of the thin-walled tubes in our so-called "helium-10" fridge, which subsequently lost all of its helium charge. On the plus side, it was only helium 4, which isn't nearly as expensive as helium 3. On the minus side, without helium 4, we can't cycle the fridge to get the detectors cold.

This is not a good way to start the month of April.

Day 2, 03/31/11 -- Shorts and opens

2011-03-31T21:10:00.000-07:00

It was a gorgeous day in Palestine today -- I wore shorts for the first time in months, and it was definitely the right decision.

Our major task for the next week or so is to get the cryostat ready for cooling down. In order to do this, we needed to get some of the hardware out of the cryostat where it was shipped in only a partially-assembled state. This led to our first encounter with CSBF's new crane use policy: For every lift, we need to have multiple people working the crane/controlling the load PLUS a safety officer to supervise. On top of that, our official crane certification hasn't yet come through, so for every lift we need to ask the CSBF personnel to operate the crane. At the moment this is not a big deal, since we use the crane fairly infrequently when putting together the cryostat. However once the gondola gets here, the crane will be needed at the very least every day, if not multiple times a day...

At any rate, we got the transport cover (too heavy for flight) off of the cryostat and I began taking off radiation shields in order to remove some wiring that needs fixing and so that we could take out the aforementioned hardware.

Once we got the hardware out, Kyle set to putting the instrument back together, starting with some thermal isolation legs and then our sub-Kelvin adsorption refrigerators. Meanwhile, Jeff and I were working on cryogenic wiring -- him replacing old wiring that was spec'ed for a different hardware setup than we now have inside the cryostat, and me fixing wiring that was inadvertently damaged before the previous cryostat run in Minnesota, causing open circuits. We all made good progress, and our timeline for closing up the cryostat is looking reasonable.

On a sad note, hardware for the CREAM experiment arrived in the west high bay. That in and of itself is not sad. What's sad is that it's sitting on the badminton court. I guess we'll have to set up the ping-pong table in our high bay (away from all the fragile stuff, of course).

On a blog-related note, internet access from our lodgings is pretty sporadic, meaning that updates may come the morning after (when I get reliable internets at CSBF) rather than the night of.

Photos:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine20110331

Day 1, 03/30/11 -- All Along the Water Tower

2011-03-30T20:04:00.000-07:00

Our goal for today was modest: unpack our equipment and set up the high bay so we could work effectively. Unfortunately for us, we were initially thwarted by some logistical issues. We had initially chosen to use the east high bay in the Palestine dual high bay building mainly for one reason: We can look out the door and see the water tower located at the CSBF site. We had been planning to mount a source on the water tower shining down toward the high bay and use it for mapping the spatial response of the telescope.

Until I got an email from one of the CSBF guys saying, effectively, "Yeah, putting stuff on the water tower is going to be difficult." It turns out that someone already has a source on the water tower: Verizon Wireless. Their 500-some-watt transmitter on top of the tower would need to be shut off in order to have someone go up there. Plus, CSBF hasn't had anyone up in the tower since the new safety regulations were initiated. Oh, and the wasps. Yeah, wasps.

What this meant for us is that we were dead in the water. If we couldn't put stuff on the water tower, we'd have to figure out some way to mount the source atop a different building that is more visible from a different high bay. Meaning that if we just started unpacking and setting up, there was a possibility we'd have to move everything over to the other bay and do it all again.

So...we waited. Explored a little bit. Played badminton. Eventually I was able to talk with the site manager, and he told me they would figure out a way to get our source on the water tower. Hallelujah! Now, at 3PM we could finally start unpacking!

We made pretty quick work of it, actually. By the time we left the high bay, we had everything we needed in the next few weeks unpacked, the computers partially set up, the work spaces defined, the sub-Kelvin fridge electronics checked, and the cryostat de-crated and set on its cart. Tomorrow we'll begin doing real "science" work in earnest, with Jeff and I working on wiring fixes/improvements and Kyle to start putting the instrument back together.
Pictures from today:
https://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInPalestine2011033002

Day 0, 03/29/11 -- Arrival in Palestine

2011-03-29T18:53:00.000-07:00

Welcome to, officially, the first post for the new edition of EBEX in Flight!

The first part of the EBEX team (myself, Jeff, and Kyle) has arrived in Palestine, Texas safely. After a painless and relatively short flight to Dallas, we ate a late lunch at Mia's Tex Mex (brisket tacos omg nom), and set out for the ~2 hour drive to Palestine. We arrived at our lodgings for our term in Palestine at the Redlands Historic Inn. While it's not exactly the lap of luxury, we have a kitchen and WiFi (sort of), so we'll manage. And we have a pet (sort of): a plaster dog I dubbed Roger. Here you can see Roger stylishly modeling Kyle's jacket:
After getting our belongings up to our suite, we decided to go to the grocery store for some supplies. We then proceeded to watch the Twins lose to the Braves in the 10th inning in their final spring training game. Tomorrow our plan is to set up our work area in the CSBF high bay. Most of our equipment arrived in Palestine on Monday, with the balance due tomorrow morning.

The photo of Roger is the only photo for the day, so I'm not going to bother putting up a link to the 'album' (such as it is).

Prologue: Palestine, TX

2011-03-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a while. Of course, that's by design -- this blog was intended only for chronicling the EBEX flight campaign(s), and we haven't had one since our flight in 2009.

That is about to change.

We are getting ready for our first long-duration flight from Antarctica. Part of this process is putting the instrument together with the gondola and making sure it all still works -- what we call "integration". We will be integrating the experiment in Palestine, Texas, home of NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.

This edition of EBEX in Flight will be, structurally, very similar to the last one: A (hopefully) daily recap of the day's activities along with pictures.

The first real post will be Tuesday or Wednesday (March 29 or 30). Please follow along (add to your RSS feed, if you like) and leave comments!

Postscript

2009-06-16T22:29:00.001-07:00

Well, I think this is going to be the last installment of this edition of EBEX In Flight. I'm told the gondola has returned to Fort Sumner, and the remaining crew are working hard to disassemble it and pack the pieces up for shipment back to Minnesota and Columbia.

I'd like to thank you, dear reader, for following along. Google Analytics tells me that the blog had 892 unique visitors over the course of the past ~3 months, with a peak of 171 visits on launch day and 175 the day after. We have plenty of work to do in analyzing the data for this flight and getting ready for the next one -- a 2-week flight from Antarctica -- and you can be sure that I'll be blogging that one too.

Until next time...

Day 83, 6/15/09 -- Farewell, Fort Sumner.

2009-06-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

Today, Milligan, Jeff, and I left Fort Sumner. We flew Frontier Airlines, on a jet with a rabbit mascot named Stu. Get it? Rabbit Stu. Yeah.

There's a skeleton crew left behind to meet the gondola when it arrives, disassemble, and pack. The CSBF recovery crew got the gondola on the truck and it is scheduled to arrive back in Fort Sumner tomorrow afternoon/evening.

I'm...going to get some gyros. And falafel.

Day 82, 6/14/09 -- Last day in Fort Sumner

2009-06-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

Today was pretty relaxing for me. After the recovery adventure the past few days, I decided that other people could deal with packing up the stuff in the high bay. The gondola is still sitting out in the desert in AZ; they won't be able to get any equipment in until tomorrow, so it probably won't be back in Fort Sumner until Wednesday.

Ilan, Dan, Kyle, and Kate are sticking around to help pack up the cryostat once the gondola gets back. Jeff, Milligan, and I are flying back to Minnesota on Monday.

Nothing really worth taking pictures of today.

Day 81, 6/12/09 -- Recovery tales

2009-06-14T01:13:00.000-07:00

First, what everyone is dying to know: No, we don't have the payload back yet. The soil near where EBEX landed is very loose and sandy, and the recovery truck actually got stuck, digging its rear tire into a nice hole about half the diameter of the tire and they had to call a tow truck to help pull it out. Recovery of the gondola is waiting on getting some heavy equipment (something with tracks, like a bulldozer or the like) to drag the recovery truck in so they can put the gondola on the trailer.

A more thorough recap of yesterday:
We left Winslow, AZ at about 3:30AM and started driving west on I-40. By about 8AM, we had made it to the turnoff for Lake Havasu City and we stopped for gas and to await further instruction on the payload location. The NASA pilot and some other crew had flown to Lake Havasu and then flew from there to search for the payload.

From the air, they were able to direct us to the gondola. When we got there, we saw that it was on its back, and short distance from the road. It landed in the middle of an empty parcel in the Stagecoach Trails "development" (if you can call it that) near Yucca, AZ. We spent a long time trying to figure out who owned the land, dealing with crappy cell phone reception, a wild goose chase, bla bla bla. Long story short, we were saved by a couple we ran into on the road, Cecil and Deanna Powell, who became interested in our predicament and actually went back to their house, got on the Internet, and looked up the owners while we were out driving around trying to get information. Cecil and Deanna -- thank you so much!
Jeff and I started by walking the ~1000 feet out to the gondola. The first indications were that it was in one piece and the important bits undamaged. We spent a long time looking around and inspecting things before starting any disassembly. Britt joined us a little later and then process went pretty smoothly for us. We started by removing important items like the disks, star camera, and other various pieces of electronics, which took the better part of the afternoon. I checked the cryogen tanks to make sure they were free of ice plugs. Because of the aforementioned truck troubles, we had to carry out all the pieces to the road to load them in the truck and car.

Once it got dark, we headed back to Lake Havasu City and got some sleep -- 7 hours, which was more sleep than I had gotten in the past two days combined.

In the morning today, we talked with the CSBF crew about what we thought needed to be done in order to secure the payload on the truck once they got it there. We split up, and we headed back out to the payload to do some last checks. When we arrived at the payload, we found that one of the neighbors had come out to the payload and put a sticker on our experiment! This amused us greatly. On the way back out, we ran into Cecil and Deanna again, and they gave us the name of a guy with heavy equipment who worked on the weekend and might be able to help CSBF get the payload out. We relayed the info to CSBF and then started the drive back to Fort Sumner.

First, we stopped by the place of the neighbor with the sticker, and we chatted for about a half hour about the project -- he said he had seen the balloon the night while it was at float -- and it ended up landing about 300 feet north of his property. On the way to Fort Sumner, we stopped at the In-N-Out Burger in Kingman, AZ. Then we basically drove the rest of the way non-stop and arrived in Fort Sumner at about midnight.

No pictures from recovery yet, but launch pictures are up at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXLaunch#

Day 80, 6/12/09 -- The road to recovery

2009-06-13T00:24:00.000-07:00

Short post today, because I'm beat: We got to the payload, most everything we expected to survive termination/impact survived, CSBF can't get their trucks near it because the ground is too loose, we removed a lot of our electronics, need sleep, pictures later, goodnight!

Day 79, 6/11/09 -- Launch day!

2009-06-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

Well, we launched! The launch looked picture-perfect, but something traumatic happened and something in our elevation actuator broke and the elevation was stuck at about 15 degrees. Not only that, we haven't been able to solve with the star camera all day. It's possible that, due to the low elevation, there's enough atmosphere in the way that the sky is too bright to see stars, which is a major bummer.

On the plus side, a lot of the ACS sensors and control systems are working great. The detectors, after a few hiccups, seem to be running smoothly. The half-wave-plate system has been purring like a kitten. And the baffles survived launch and seem to still be intact because we can't see any sun-synchronous signal.

The float winds were predicted to be high, and indeed have been in the high-40-knot range all day, meaning that the payload just zoomed off to the west after reaching float altitude. Thus, shortly after the launch (at about 11AM), Britt and I left, following Randall, Dorothy, and Bo from CSBF in the recovery trucks. We caravaned across New Mexico, ending up in Winslow, AZ to meet up with the downrange team.

As of 9:40PM New Mexico time, the EBEX flight has been terminated. It is predicted to land slightly east of Lake Havasu, AZ. Britt, myself, and possibly Jeff will meet up with the CSBF recovery team at 3AM to begin the drive out to the western edge of AZ, where we will have to try and figure out how to extricate EBEX from the mountains it looks likely to land in.

Launch video:

EBEX Launch, 6/11/09.

Launch pictures will be up later, probably after recovery and I've had some time to sleep.

EDIT: Launch pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXLaunch#

June 11 launch attempt -- now, go cat go!

2009-06-11T01:29:00.000-07:00

We had three to get ready...

0215h local:
Arrived at high bay. Moved gondola toward door and rotated around. Jeff has started closing up the cryostat access panel. Amber showed up 5 minutes prior after a heroic day of traveling, culminating in a 5 hour drive from El Paso. Milligan's dad showed up again too!

0230h local:
Pre-flight checkouts in progress. Should be picked up and out the door soon.

0340h local:
Gondola is out the door, baffles are open, flight train is attached, mirror is cleaned. Now lifting to remove the casters and put on the crush pads.

0413h local:
CSBF is figuring out which direction to lay the balloon. The pi ball seems to be indicating fairly calm winds (~8 knots by my reckoning) at 950 feet AGL, but perhaps a little too strong halfway up. Britt is feeding us cookies.

0436h local:
Looks like they've picked a layout direction. CSBF is moving out the helium tanker trucks and the balloon spool truck (AKA "The Monster").

0446h local:
We're going to roll out to the pad in about 5-10 minutes.

0546h local:
We're out on the pad, on lithium (flight) batteries, and our pre-flight checks are done. We're now hands-off. The layout direction looks dead on to the direction indicated by the pi ball, though the wind is a little stronger than earlier both at the surface and at pi ball altitude. We're waiting for them to roll out the balloon.

0615h local:
The balloon has been unrolled!! They are installing the helium vent valves at the top and making the attachment to the parachute. Inflation could start as soon as 10-15 minutes.

0640h local, roughly:
Balloon inflation has begun! We're gonna launch or waste $150,000 worth of balloon and helium...

0712h local:
Balloon still inflating! Almost there...

0801h local:
LAUNCH!!!

0805h local:
There may be a problem with the elevation actuator. We set the elevation to approximately 60 degrees pre-launch, but on launch the elevation was observed to be extremely low. It's possible the actuator may have broken, meaning we will have no elevation control for the flight.

0947h local:
It indeed seems that our elevation actuator is broken. While we can still do the observations we hope to do, it will limit our flexibility in scheduling and making the observations. This is going to be the last post of this live-blog, as soon Britt and I will have to start driving so we can meet the payload after termination. I'll try and post again tonight.

Day 78, 6/10/09 -- Once more into the breach

2009-06-10T16:42:00.000-07:00

We got word today that tomorrow we will get another launch attempt. The winds look nice and low, and we've got high hopes. If we don't launch tomorrow, the winds don't look good for Friday or Saturday morning. The winds at float altitudes have gotten really strong -- up into the 40-50 knot range at the highest altitudes we'll be flying at, and somewhat lower (in the 20's) at our overnight altitudes if we decide to continue overnight.

Ilan re-cycled the fridges earlier today, Britt and I went through some information for the recovery crew (which will consist of me, Britt, and some CSBF personnel). We went through our day-before pre-flight checklist and then left for the evening. Plan is to show up at 2:15AM to get out the door by 2:30AM. I'll be live-blogging again too.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico061009#

Day 77, 6/9/09 -- Back to flight mode.

2009-06-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

FIREBall had a very successful flight, it seems. They terminated at about 10AM and landed near Cedar City, Utah. Initial reports indicate that they payload is in good shape (it fell over on landing, but that's to be expected) and they got a lot of good data.

After the few days off that everyone in the group took, it was time to get back to a flight-ready mindset. To that end, Ilan cycled our cryogenic system to get detectors cold and we ran a flight simulation to make sure that everyone still knew how to do what they needed to do.

As is typical for flight sims, there wasn't much for me to do. Because I already knew that we weren't going be able to attempt a launch tomorrow morning, I took the opportunity to prep and cook a brisket that I had bought over a week ago and had just been waiting for an opportunity to cook. I made a spice rub and let it marinate overnight in the fridge, and then got it cooking in the charcoal grill at the base at about noon. Six hours later, we were rewarded with this:

Needless to say, it disappeared rather quickly.

After the flight sim and brisket consumption, Jeff and I showed Kyle the ins and outs of filling cryogens on the gondola. Dan showed up in the evening as well. The plan for tonight is to do some star camera alignment and scan tests, so Jeff and I headed home.

Pictures today are of the brisket. You know, the important stuff.
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico060909#

Day 76, 6/8/09 -- ...and then there was one.

2009-06-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

FIREBall launched today.

They had a fairly late launch at about 11:45 AM, which is great for FIREBall -- it means they will get to spend more time at float in darkness.

The launch was not without complications. The winds were actually quite low, and the balloon went up very slowly compared to the NCT launch I saw roughly a month ago. Once they released the payload, it went basically straight up. The launch vehicle driver was backing away, but Big Bill can't go very fast so FIREBall hit the launch pin on the way up, scraping along the doors that cover their telescope. It looked (and sounded) fairly violent, and the FIREBall team was rightfully concerned that the doors might have been damaged and they wouldn't be able to open them once they got up to observing altitude:

FIREBall launch

Once they got high enough, they tried it -- and succeeded! It's now nearly 1AM, and the payload is over the Four Corners, drifting northwest at 22 knots at an altitude of nearly 113,000 feet. From what I hear, the mission is going well. Go FIREBall!

After the launch, we tied up some loose ends and most of us went to the lake house for a dip in the lake and some food. Britt and Michele returned late tonight, as well as Shaul and Ilan with a new addition in tow, Kyle.

The earliest opportunity we are likely to have to launch is Thursday (weather-dependent, of course).

Pictures of FIREBall launch:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/FIREBallLaunch#

Day 75, 6/7/09 -- Back in Fort Sumner

2009-06-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

After a leisurely morning and a great breakfast at Counter Culture Cafe in Santa Fe, we began the trek back to Fort Sumner. Most of the crew stopped at Montezuma hot springs, just north of Las Vegas, NM, but I headed straight for Fort Sumner so I could check on the cryostat -- and it's a good thing, too: The cryostat had about 1 liter of liquid nitrogen left in it, which would have lasted only 3 hours longer. It had about 4 liters of liquid helium, which would have lasted for about 8 hours.

Once I got back, Seth and I added some liquid nitrogen, and Seth filled me in on the Fort Sumner operations. Everything was pretty much copacetic while we were gone, and FIREBall is going to try to launch again tomorrow morning. If they don't launch, there's a chance that we'll get the next opportunity, as the weather forecast for mid-week is predicted to have some cloud cover that will significantly affect their altitude.

After the rest of the gang got back from the hot springs (which they said were actually hot, unlike the one we went to a couple days ago), Jeff and I added helium to the cryostat. We then headed home, and then watched a couple of movies (Lucky Number Slevin and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle) at one of the houses. A laptop, an LCD projector, a white sheet, and a Cambridge Soundworks MicroWorks computer speaker system makes for a pretty decent movie setup.

No pictures today. After all, Friday's mustache picture should be enough picture for weeks.

Day 74, 6/6/09 -- EBEX gets some culture

2009-06-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Another day in Santa Fe for the EBEX crew. Today we split up a little bit in the morning; I slept in which was much-needed. At around noon, a subset of us headed to a place called Bagelmania which, despite its rather silly-sounding name, makes a good breakfast. Crab cake eggs benedict? Yes, please.

Will, Daniel, and I headed to the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. I hadn't realized before the breadth of her talent, and I particularly liked her philosophy on art, which was basically: I paint things I think are beautiful -- don't read too much into it! We then met up with Joy, Jeff, and Milligan at the New Mexico History Museum and learned about the rather violent history of this region (I suppose the same could be said of any region, though...).

While we were out getting our culture on, Hannes and François drove a little ways out of town for another hiking excursion. After they returned, Hannes suggested we go to the 2nd Street Brewery where we had some appetizers. We then re-agglomerated at the motel and walked into downtown for dinner at the Thai Cafe. After that, more Santa Fe nightlife, such as it is.

I didn't take any pictures today. And I just now discovered that I had accidentally duplicated blog post title day numbers -- all they way back at day 9 and day 14. I had to go through every single post and edit the titles, and I still haven't figured out how exactly I managed to duplicate June 3rd.

Day 73, 6/5/09 -- EBEX still in Santa Fe!

2009-06-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

The EBEX crew had another full day in Santa Fe yesterday.

We had a late breakfast at Tecolote Cafe, where we met a guy with a truly awesome Salvador-Dali-like mustache. The remaining members of the EBEX mustache crew (the stalwarts -- myself, Hannes, and François) got our picture taken with him (see today's album).

From there, we drove up highway 285 to visit Bandelier National Monument. Bandelier is a park set in the area around Frijoles Canyon, near Los Alamos, where the ruins of ancient Pueblo cliff dwellings were found (by a guy named Bandelier, hence the name).

After walking the trails at Bandelier and checking out the caves (which were pretty neat), we then drove towards Jemez, passing by Valles Caldera, to find a hot spring that Hannes had visited before. After a decent few-mile-uphill hike, we were rewarded with a spring that, if not hot, was at least comfortably warm. We soaked in the spring for a bit while getting our toes nibbled by minnows before heading back down.

On the drive back to Santa Fe, we took a different route than when we drove in, and were treated to some stunning views of red- and orange-hued cliffs and mesas. I have to say, the landscape in this part of New Mexico is truly spectacular.

Once back in Santa Fe, we headed to Il Vicino to get some pizza (real pizza from a wood-fired oven!) and then wandered around to check out the Santa Fe nightlife. The town was definitely more alive on Friday night than it was the night before.

The reader may have noticed that I put a new title image up on the blog. Also, the reader may have noticed that I somehow managed to get the dates screwed up in recent blog post titles. I'm working on sorting it out.

Pictures from today at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico060509#

Day 72, 6/4/09 -- EBEX in Santa Fe!

2009-06-05T00:49:00.000-07:00

Well, due to all the bad weather, people have scattered. We found out today that FIREBall is going to try launching again tomorrow, and then the weather gets really bad (hail, lightning, frogs falling form skies, etc.) for the next two days after that.

Because we don't have a chance at launching, Ilan and Shaul have gone back to Minnesota, Amber and Britt to New York. This morning, Will and I drove to Albuquerque to drop Michele off at the airport for a flight to Oakland so he could visit some friends in Berkeley for a few days. From there, we drove north on I-25 to Santa Fe, where we met two other cars containing Hannes, François, Milligan, Kate, Jeff, Joy, and Daniel.

The first order of business was, of course, lunch. We were all starving, and we found a place called The Shed in the downtown Santa Fe that, frankly, was delicious. It's not that Fred's is so bad, but it's not really...good. This food was good. I had forgotten how good food could be. We then sorted out lodging, and Will ran an errand (to send a gift to his daughter whose birthday is coming up).

After that, on a recommendation of one of Jeff's friends, we took a hike up the Atalaya trail. Starting at about 7500 feet, the trail takes a couple of miles to go up to the peak at approximately 9100 feet. It turns out that most of us in the group are pretty out of shape. It took a good hour to get up there, taking a few rests here and there to let our weary calves rest, but it was well worth it once we got to the top. On the way down, most of us at some point or another took to running down the trail, which was lots of fun and everybody managed not to trip and fall. Our legs will definitely be feeling the effects tomorrow though.

After cleaning ourselves up, we walked back into downtown for dinner. After a bit of wandering, we re-found an Indian restaurant that Will and I had seen earlier in the day. It was decent Indian food, but the main point is that it was Indian food -- something that many of us haven't seen for over two months.

After that, we went to a bar called Cowgirl that Jeff was really dying to go to. We hung out there for a while and eventually made our way back to the motel.

http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico060409#

Day 71, 6/3/09 -- No FIREBall launch

2009-06-05T00:40:00.000-07:00

sorry for the late post!

FIREBall scrubbed this morning. We got a prediction for fairly bad weather for the next few days, so we finalized our plans to go to Santa Fe for a couple of days to relax for a bit. To that end, we put the appropriate amount of cryogens in the cryostat so it could sit unattended for a few days. Nothing much else happened.

In the evening, though, there was an awesome electrical storm the likes of which I have NEVER seen before. It was basically continuous lightning strikes to our south-southeast or so. I took a nice little video of it, set to the tune of Dvorak's New World Symphony (it was on the car radio). Towards the end of the piece, it actually seemed as if the lightning was flashing in time to the music!

http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico060309#

Day 70, 6/3/03 -- FIREBall's up next!

2009-06-03T16:20:00.000-07:00

Big news today: FIREBall has taken tomorrow morning's launch opportunity. The winds look borderline, so it'll be what Bill Stepp calls 'groundhog day': They'll show up, stick their heads out and see what the winds are like, and make the call in the morning whether or not to roll out.

Anticipating this, several members of the group have left for a while. Shaul, Ilan, Amber, and Britt have all departed for a few days. This should work out well, since the weather for Friday and Saturday doesn't look good for a launch.

Most of us that have remained here are making plans to go to Santa Fe for a day or so to unwind a little bit. Assuming that FIREBall launches, the next possible launch attempt for us probably wouldn't be until Monday because FIREBall's flight track will take them almost all the way to California, and CSBF wouldn't have enough manpower to launch another payload until the FIREBall recovery team returned.

Again, no pictures.

Day 69, 6/2/09 -- I'm running out of titles

2009-06-03T08:40:00.001-07:00

Well, we didn't launch again. CSBF then told us that there would be no launch opportunity today, Wednesday morning (yeah, I'm posting this a little late), so Jeff and I ended up opening up the experiment and relocating a heater from the half-wave-plate drive motor mount to the rotary vacuum feedthrough on the cryostat -- there were concerns that the feedthrough would get too cold if we drooped down too low overnight, as it's only rated to -50C and at ~80,000 feet the temperature gets to about -55C. Jeff spent about 5 hours hunched over uncomfortably confined in the gondola inner frame, squeezed between the cryostat, the window champagne bucket baffle, and a gyro box working on the heaters while I fetched tools, offered advice, did some soldering, and helped out wherever I could. In the end, we tested the heaters and found that the feedthrough ran about 20C above ambient temperature, even in the high-pressure environment at ground level, and the motor mount got to 5C above ambient -- more than enough to survive an overnight flight at low altitudes.

Once we finished, we headed over to the ranch house where the rest of the crew had already started to party. Sam and Jerry have now gone home, and Joy and Daniel have moved into the ranch house in their place. If there's no launch attempt tomorrow, some of us are thinking of driving out to Santa Fe to see what it's all about.

I didn't take any pictures of the launch attempt in the morning because we didn't even roll away from the high bay, and everything pretty much looks the same as the previous attempts.

Launch attempt 3 -- third time's the charm?

2009-06-02T02:15:00.000-07:00

0315h local:
We showed up around 0215h for roll-out today. We're getting much quicker with the pre-launch prep. As of right now, the gondola is out the door, baffles are ready, and we're hanging from Big Bill. We're waiting on the wind direction to stabilize before we roll out to the pad.

0327h local:
Put up the pictures from yesterday's attempt at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico060109#

0340h local:
Bill Stepp came by and told us there was a problem with one of the terminate package's squib -- either the one that separates the balloon from the payload or the one that separates the parachute from the balloon after landing. It'll take an hour to swap out...so we're stuck until then. We're watching Flight of the Conchords in the conference room to pass the time.

0440h local:
We're moving out to the pad. Still a question on wind direction, and the CSBF weather crew is being hampered by inoperational radar at Cannon AFB. But we have to try...

0522h local:
Still haven't moved out. And it is cold in here today. Brr.

0627h local:
A front is moving through, and there's a possibility of a lull in the winds after it passes, so we're still waiting.

0655h local:
Officially scrubbed, again.

Day 68, 6/1/09 - I don't want no scrub

2009-06-01T15:58:00.001-07:00

Launch attempt 2 was scrubbed, but once again FIREBall has declined the launch opportunity due to the flight profile, so once again we are at bat. We are aiming for a roll-out of 2:30AM this time instead of 1:15, as we spent a lot of time yesterday just sitting at the door of the high bay.

Pictures from this morning's launch attempt will be up later.
EDIT:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico060109#

June 1 launch attempt

2009-06-01T01:07:00.001-07:00

Well, we're here at the high bay again getting ready for another launch attempt.

0208h local:
We've got the gondola out the door, the baffles in place, and the flight suspension hardware on. The CSBF team is working on installing the crush pads. Things are going more quickly this time around -- amazing what a dry run will do.

0234h local:
Waiting...just hanging out outside the building before rolling out to the pad. People are very relaxed this time around.

0251h local:
Pi ball launched and indicates low-level winds are lower than yesterday.

0305h local:
Delay now is in figuring out which direction to lay out the balloon.

0326h local:
Rolling out to the pad.

0356h local:
Out on the pad, balloon truck is out, helium trucks are out. Current plan is for hands-off at 0430h, and CSBF is going to start unrolling the balloon then.

0420h local:
We are hands-off. All of our pre-flight checklists are done. The balloon crate is out by the balloon truck. Plan is to open it around 5AM and start laying it out.

0523h local:
Still haven't opened the balloon crate. There was some concern about wind direction, which now seems to be fine. There's some concern about the winds at ~400 ft, which were a little stronger than the winds at 1000 ft.

0530h local:
Winds have picked up...11 knots at 500 feet and 18 knots at 1000. Too fast to launch, but we're going to wait a while longer and see what happens. If they go down...

0619h local:
Low-level winds haven't died down. We're scrubbed.

Day 67, 5/31/09 -- Launch attempt 1, scrubbed

2009-05-31T14:55:00.000-07:00

Well, after all that, no launch. After bringing the gondola inside, we went home to get some sleep.

We came back for the weather briefing, and the winds have REALLY picked up for FIREBall -- they would only have gotten 4 hours of night-time flight at float, so again they decided to pass on the launch opportunity. This means we get to do the whole thing again tomorrow morning!

Luckily, some of the things that we did yesterday on the hardware end don't need to be done again, so we'll save some time. Right now we're going through our pre-flight checklist again and then heading home to get some sleep.

Pictures from today's launch attempt:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico053109#

May 31st launch attempt -- live-blogging

2009-05-31T00:13:00.000-07:00

0115 hours local time:
We convened at the high bay at about 0030 h for the final pre-launch prep. Will and Amber ran a quick scan test and we've started closing up the access panels and getting ready to roll out. Mark and Bill from CSBF came by to tell us that there are a few more showers in the area and they're going to watch the situation. Right now we're getting ready to push the gondola back towards the door and hook the gondola up to Big Bill to lift out. If we get the go-ahead from the weather people, we'll, uh, go ahead.

0145h local:
I just went up with Mark from CSBF to get the gondola hooked up to Big Bill for roll-out. We're standing by pending good news on the weather.

0252h local:
We are outside the building and the baffles are opened and the braces installed. We are basically ready to roll out to the launch pad.

0304h local:
Mirror cover is off. CSBF is attaching ballast hoppers and crush pads.

0331h local:
Crush pads and ballast hoppers are on. The CSBF electronics crew is finalizing the routing of their cables and antennas. They've already updated the GPS tracking webpage for us!
http://towerfts.csbf.nasa.gov/GoogleMaps/ConvGps.htm

0400h local:
The weather guys have told us there's a slight possibility of light showers in the area, so we've covered up some sensitive things and we're going to wait and see what happens.

0405h local:
Just found out that Jerry is posting video clips in near-real time to YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/grapesmoker1

0430h local:
Weather is looking good. Still waiting for official word.

0454h local:
They've driven out the balloon vehicle and have launched a pilot balloon ("pi ball") that's used to gauge the wind speeds. This is a good sign.

0505h local:
Rolling out to the pad!

0557h local:
Mechanical work on gondola done. Sun has risen. They're laying out the flight train now. Looking good! We're going through our pre-flight checklist.

0626h local:
Pre-flight checklist done -- we're hands-off the experiment now. The balloon is still in its crate; they're waiting for the low-level (~1000ft above ground level) winds to stabilize.

0700h local:
Launch scrubbed. The low-level winds ended up lining up fine, but by that time the surface winds had picked up and it was a no-go. Maybe tomorrow.

Day 66, 5/30/09 -- BREAKING NEWS: EBEX launch attempt tomorrow, Sunday May 31!

2009-05-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

At today's weather briefing we got the prognosis for a decent ~12 hr. flight. FIREBall's flight profile would have put them at 111,000 feet for most of the night, which they decided was too low for them so the opportunity fell to us and we took it.

Right now we are going through the first stages of our pre-flight checklist before we head home to try and get some rest. We have to be back by 1AM so CSBF can take us out.

More updates as they become available.

Day 65, 5/29/09 -- The ennui of readiness

2009-05-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

I'm going to just come out and say it: Today was boring. And that is precisely what makes it so fantastic. People were, for the most part, just either doing nothing (like me...well, I was reading a book) or doing very minor work. Today's flight sim went smoothly. Not perfect, but well-enough.

We're ready.

It looks like the downrange weather is getting a little better, so it's likely that FIREBall will take the next launch opportunity.

Various people have left: Ilan and Dan have both left for Minneapolis earlier (Ilan a few days ago, Dan yesterday). Shaul left today to spend the weekend at home as well. All are planning to be back soon-ish.

Because so many UMN people have left at different times, we've been experiencing a serious shortage of cars. Shaul arranged for us to rent a couple of cars from Clovis, so Britt, Michele, Jeff, and I drove out there. Jeff and I drove the new rentals back (a red Chevy Cobalt and a white Mazda3) while Britt and Michele ran some errands and procured Thai food for the rest of the group. After our flight sim, we went back to Britt, Michele, and Will's rental house, ate the Thai food, and watched Ghost Town using our LCD projector and a white sheet for a screen. It was a nice, relaxing evening after a nice, relaxing day at the high bay.

No pictures today; sorry Daniel's mom.

Day 64, 5/28/09 -- I'm waiting for the day

2009-05-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

Today was a pretty relaxed day. Britt fixed the issue with the ACS card not reading correctly (burnt regulator), Will did a lot of tests of the motor control box, Jeff and I filled liquid helium, and I cycled the fridges.

We're still not flying. We still have thunderstorms off to our west which will bring our altitude down significantly overnight. The meteorologists tell us this weather pattern is starting to clear out, and will be improved by Sunday. Until then...pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico052809#

Day 63, 5/27/09 -- The waiting is the hardest part

2009-05-27T17:43:00.001-07:00

Well, we're basically ready. Sure, one ACS card is reading funny temperatures, and there are some lingering issues with the rotator, but these are all pretty minor.

The real holdup is the weather. Darn monsoon pattern over AZ is screwing us over every day. So, we wait. And wait. And...well, you get the picture.

We did see a V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor today. It circled around and landed and took off from the runway at the airport four or five times. It was neat.

Pictures (all Osprey):
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico052709

Day 62, 5/26/09 -- Things are looking up

2009-05-26T18:41:00.001-07:00

After yesterday's horrible day, today was much better. Britt and Michele finished the last of the mechanical work on the gondola in the morning. Jeff, Milligan, and I rolled in around 10. Jeff and I filled cryogens, then Will and the ACS team did a few scan tests.

At today's weather briefing, we got more bad news: The same monsoon-like weather pattern that's been sitting over western NM and eastern AZ shows very little sign of dissipating, so the projected flights for the next few days look pretty crappy. For us, we would droop down to 72,000 feet at night, at which point everything gets much colder and there's a strong possibility that we wouldn't be able to point the telescope due to the strong winds. So...we wait.

Weather aside, the experiment is mostly ready now. There are some software crashes that are being investigated but don't necessarily kill us, and an ACS card stopped reading out its analog channels so it needs to be replaced with its spare, but otherwise...we're ready.

We also got a new lift delivered to replace the one that broke. The new one is a JLG E400AJP -- and it goes a full 10 feet higher than the one we had. It's pretty sweet. It is a foot and a half wider than the old one, but that should still be ok.

The team took an early night off tonight. There were plans to go to Clovis, but I think due to the thunderstorms in the area it didn't happen. Tomorrow: another flight sim.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInFlight052609#

Commenting

2009-05-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

I just now realized that the Blogger settings were configured to only allow comments from registered users. I've now disabled that -- so comment away, previously silenced masses!

Better late than never, right?

Day 61, 5/25/09 -- When it rains, it pours.

2009-05-25T22:31:00.000-07:00

This has been a taxing week for the EBEX crew. 2 of our 6 gyros failed; that manufacturer was not at all sypathetic to our plight and we ended up reconfiguring our system to use 4 gyros instead of 6. Then we had our issues with the pivot, which required rebuilding the bearing assembly. Last night the cherry picker broke, and the fix was only semi-usable. And remember when our GPS unit broke about 2 weeks ago? This morning, CSBF took us outside to calibrate our repaired GPS unit...and it's somehow broken again!

To add insult to injury, the wind shifted direction and picked up speed while we were outside, so we ended up facing directly into the wind with not-very-well braced baffle ears (they were folded in to minimize their cross section, which eliminates the bracing that stabilizes them). The zip ties that were holding the ears in place failed, and each ear in turn swung backwards 180 degrees -- keep in mind that they're only designed to fold out 45 degrees. The resulting carnage was an impressively twisted bit of baffle support structure and smashed foam.

The rest of the day was devoted to fixing the damage caused by the wind in the morning, basically putting us a day behind where we wanted to be. I was so dejected I didn't take any pictures of the damage, but Dan got a few pictures after everything was mostly fixed.

On the bright side, NASA is loaning us one of their GPS units for the flight, and it looks like we might be getting a new cherry picker tomorrow. On the downside, the flight weather looks pretty bad for the next few days at least, and our flight computer keeps crashing every few hours.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico052509#

Day 60, 5/24/09 -- Working pivot, broken cherry picker

2009-05-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

Well, the title basically sums up the entire state of affairs in the high bay today. Will did some pivot tests today and everything is basically working fine.

The big failure of today (because there's always one, right?) was of our cherry picker, a JLG E300AJP boom lift. After Will used it to do some pivot motor diagnostics, it basically just...stopped working. While in the middle of the high bay doorway. We spent a few hours poking around, trying to figure out what was going on, noticing a flashing error code on the unit, trying to find a service manual, etc., etc. We ended up calling United Rentals, from whence we rented the unit, and they actually had a guy drive out to Fort Sumner....from Santa Fe. On a Sunday night. On Memorial Day weekend.

He showed up at about 10PM, poked around a little, plugged in a diagnostic tool into the port in the lift, and poked around a little more. Eventually he got it to go out the door, but it now only goes in one direction, with one speed (FAST), and it doesn't stop. This, as you might imagine, is less than useful. It remains to be seen how we can work around not having this lift -- it basically gets used every day for at least an hour, if not more. It's going to be difficult to have to use a less-flexible lifting system.

In other news, we had another flight simulation at the end of the day. Unlike last time, it was NOT a total disaster, though it was by no means perfect. Still, we're getting there.

Pictures for today:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico052409#

Day 59, 5/23/09 -- The rebirth of the rotator

2009-05-24T00:58:00.000-07:00

We were planning on doing another flight sim today, but instead the entire crew was focused on figuring out the funny business with our rotator/pivot. It seems that the problems we were seeing yesterday got worse overnight -- the pivot wouldn't even make the gondola move even if we hit it with all the current we have available. After doing some tests, we determined there was too much friction in the bearings, so we brought the rotator down.

After it was disassembled, we (meaning Michele, Seth, and Britt) found bearings clogged with...all sorts of crap. Some of the rollers (they're tapered roller bearings, for whatever that's worth) were clogged with the accumulated schmutz of 2 months in the high bay. After cleaning and regreasing the bearings, the pivot was reassembled, remounted, and once again the gondola spins freely! As the kids say, "w00t!".

On the software front, it seems that we are now in a stable software state, free of (excessive) crashing and ready for flight. SWEET.

While all the hard work was being done on the rotator, a few of us (myself, Jeff, Dan, Ilan, and Kate, joined by Joy and Daniel later) went to Clovis for some R&R. We had dinner at a Thai (plus Chinese and Japanese!) restaurant that was suprisingly good and then headed to Kelley's, an Irish pub in the heart of Clovis that Dan mentioned was a popular hangout for Air Force guys from nearby Cannon AFB. Good times were had by all.

Today, I took more pictures, because apparently Daniel's mom complained that I wasn't taking enough pictures. So these ones are for you, Daniel's mom.
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico052309#

Day 58, 5/22/09 -- Flight simulation, take 1.

2009-05-22T21:43:00.000-07:00

Today we had our first attempt at a flight simulation. It was, predictably, a complete disaster. Besides the detector power accidentally being shut off and losing all of our detectors, the azimuth motors have been exhibiting funny behavior that we spent the rest of the day looking into. And the detector power going out also screwed up the commanding for our half-wave-plate system.

On the bright side, after the detector power outage, it only took about a half hour to get them all back, which I think is a record for us.

Milligan, Hannes, and Joy flew out to Winslow, AZ where CSBF has their 'downrange station' set up for line-of-sight telemetry when payloads get out of range of Ft. Sumner. They set up a couple computers there along with the downlink hardware and made sure that everything worked before flying back. Bonus points for anyone who can name the famous song that mentions Winslow, AZ.

There's a possibility we'll fly on Sunday morning. Stay tuned...

No pictures today (what can I say, most everything just looks the same).

Day 57, 5/21/09 -- Crashing code make Hulk AAAAANGRY

2009-05-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

Well, the gondola team tried to do scan tests outdoors last night but were stymied by a consistently crashing computer. Turns out that all of the changes people have been making to the flight control code have made it...break. As of today, we have instituted a new code policy so that no non-essential changes are made, all changes are made on a case-by-case basis to determine essential-ness(?), and changes are only made by two people: Milligan and Will, who are the most familiar with the code. By reverting to an old version of the code, it seems that we now once again have working flight computers.

A corollary is that hardware changes are also to be kept to a minimum. We have reached a point where making changes has the potential to do more harm than good.

As such, there's little for a hardware guy like me to do...so I did basically nothing today. Jeff made some structural improvements to some baffling and made a foam cover for the mirror. The detector crew did some noise tests this morning outdoors and everything looks pretty good.

Now, we wait. Depending on the weather, there might be a flight opportunity tomorrow and possibly on Sunday as well. FIREBall gets dibs, though, so if they want it, they get it.

NCT was found perched precariously on the slope of a ravine where they have to get it out by helicopter. The recovery team is surely working hard on getting it home safely.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico052109#

Day 56, 5/20/09 -- Rain, rain, go away

2009-05-20T20:51:00.000-07:00

Today, after the morning's tests were finished, Britt spent a lot of time routing and tying up cables on the gondola. This is, quite frankly, an annoying, frustrating, and often thankless task, but Britt took it on anyway.

The weather for a launch in the next few days looks pretty iffy. It's not so much the conditions in Fort Sumner, which are reasonable, but the thunderstorms to the west of us that would bring down the balloon altitude significantly. It's unlikely that a flight over these conditions would meet either our or FIREBall's flight requirements. There's a possible launch opportunity on Friday morning, and again possibly on Sunday.

Jeff and I cut a hole in the baffling to allow access to the cryostat so we can fill without removing the whole rear baffle. Even so, filling the cryostat's LN2 tank now easily takes twice as long as it did without the baffle, and probably 5 times as long as when the cryostat was on its cart. Still, it beats having to remove the baffle.

The gondola is going out again tonight for pointing and scanning tests, but there's no strong need for myself or Jeff to be there so we left early. The detector crew is planning on doing some noise tests during the latter part of tonight's outdoor adventure.

No pictures today.

Day 55, 5/19/09 -- EBEX in Flight, late edition

2009-05-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

We took EBEX outside again last night in order to do far-sidelobe testing. In order to do that, we had to finalize ALL of the baffling -- a time consuming task since some had been removed in order to fix some electronics. We got the baffling done around 1AM, the ACS team did some pointing tests for about an hour and a half, and then we were picked up and taken outside at about 2:30AM.

After going outside, we were set down on the ground and the baffles were set in their flight position (they have to be folded in order to get out the high bay door). Jeff and I left at about 4:30 AM while a smaller subset of the team stayed to do the far sidelobe tests. Initial indications look good -- no far sidelobe features at the roughly -90 dB level, which was about the noise floor of the measurement.

In the morning after being brought back in, CSBF weighed us for our official flight weight: 5925 lbs! That's 75 lbs LESS than we had been hoping for. That means we can carry a little bit more ballast and thus hopefully avoid drooping down too far at night.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico051909#

Day 54, 5/18/09 -- Loose ends

2009-05-18T21:07:00.000-07:00

Most of today was spent doing miscellaneous things on the gondola. The ACS crew investigated the oddness with the gyros and are reverting back to an old, less-redundant configuration since two out of our six gyros are wonky.

Jeff did some work on the baffles, covering some seams, and I did some work on the cryostat. Seth from Columbia fixed an issue which we were having with our disk pressure vessels and flight control program, and Milligan has fixed our detector algorithm manager so Hannes and François were able to get detectors tuned today in about a half an hour rather than half a day. All in all, good progress all around.

Tonight, the pointing team is going outside to attempt some scan tests.

NCT, which launched yesterday, managed to get a 37 hour flight! They would have terminated earlier, but they were over inhospitable terrain so it was delayed for quite a while. 37 hours might be a record for a flight from Fort Sumner. I found out today that Eric from the NCT team has a blog up at http://goneballooning.wordpress.com/.

No pictures from today, but Milligan gave me some nice panoramas from the NCT launch yesterday which I put up in the NCT launch album at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/NCTLaunch#

Day 53, 5/17/09 -- NCT launched!

2009-05-18T00:40:00.000-07:00

The big news today is that NCT launched this morning! While their flight forecast was only a little better than what they had yesterday, they decided to go ahead -- and it's a good thing they did, because it's turning out to be a great flight! Even now, 18 hours after launch, they're still at float and it looks like they have plenty of room to keep going.

Today I worked on the last piece of baffling for the top of the cryostat, Jeff worked on installing a heater on the half-wave-plate drive motor, and the ACS crew tried to debug some faulty gyro readings. The detector crew has made good progress on getting the algorithms working so we'll be in good shape for the flight. Ilan cycled our sub-Kelvin refrigerators so we can do more detector/noise tests tomorrow.

We took the evening off and had dinner at the so-called "lake house", where Hannes, François, Ilan, and Dan are staying. We had a nice relaxing dinner, and some of us went into the lake. A few of us, myself included, went swimming at about midnight and were treated to both cold water as well as an amazing night sky.

All of my pictures today are of the NCT launch and flight:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/NCTLaunch#

Day 52, 5/16/09 -- Almost.

2009-05-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

Today Jeff and I did more work on the baffles, fixing up the minor damage from the winds during compatibility testing and improving the structure a bit. The big news today, though, was the weather: Tomorrow morning looks like an excellent opportunity for a launch. The problem, however, is that the projected flight track would take any payload launched close to the Mexico border, and they are required to terminate if the payload gets within 50 miles of the border. Even a minor deviation from the projected path would require an early termination and thus a short flight -- perhaps only 10-12 hours instead of the 24 that every group here is hoping for.

For FIREBall, this is definitely a no-go: They can only observe at night, and CSBF only launches payloads from Fort Sumner in the mornings -- if they only got a 10 hour flight, they wouldn't get any data at all. The NCT crew also would like to get some post-sunset flight time so they can test their systems for their eventual long-duration flight from Australia which, unlike an Antarctic long-duration-flight, has to go through sunsets. For us, the flight didn't meet our minimum requirements for the science we wanted to do.

In the end, it was decided that there would be an NCT launch attempt tomorrow if the projected flight track improves as we get weather data closer to flight. We'll see how it goes.

Also, I got a package of delicious date bars from a friend in Minneapolis! They were a big hit with the rest of the crew here too.

No pictures today.

Day 51, 5/15/09 -- Compatibility: Achieved. Rest: Pending.

2009-05-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

As expected, the FIREBall launch was scrubbed due to high low-level (~500ft above ground) winds. We arrived at 4AM anticipating this so we could prepare for our compatibility test with the NASA electronics. This would be the first major test of the enormous baffles that we put on earlier -- would they survive, even with these relatively low winds? Stay tuned...

Ok, they survived. At some points the winds started gusting up to almost 20 knots, I believe -- worse than typical launch conditions -- and the baffles, perhaps amazingly, didn't completely fall apart. Some mylar peeled off, but nothing that will be too difficult to fix.

More importantly, our electronics passed the compatibility test! We should be flight-ready in a couple of days -- then, we wait for FIREBall and NCT to launch. The next launch window looks to be Sunday morning.

Last, Amber and Seth arrived from Columbia this morning -- with authentic New York bagels in hand! The ACS and bolometer crews had more work to do today, so Jeff and I filled liquid helium in the cryostat and then left around 11AM. We're going to try and get some rest to recover from the past few days of work.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico051509#

Day 50, 5/14/09 -- Compatibility looms

2009-05-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

We ended up not doing compatibility today -- we got behind schedule and the winds were going to get too strong before we finished, so we had to delay.

FIREBall has their first launch attempt tomorrow, but the conditions are pretty marginal. If they scrub, we're going to do compatibility in the morning -- at 5AM. We have to show up at 4AM. Sweet.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico051409#

Day 49, 5/13/09 -- Death by a thousand aluminum tape cuts

2009-05-14T01:14:00.000-07:00

Busy day, getting ready for compatibility test tomorrow. Too tired to write a full post.

I added some pictures from Milligan in the albums for the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 11th, and 13th. His pictures are at the end of those albums.

Pictures for today:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico051309#

Day 48, 5/12/09 -- EBEX: We know drama

2009-05-12T22:42:00.000-07:00

Today was full of dramatic moments. Before we get to the drama, though, Science: We got the majority of the remaining baffles up -- a big task that had been delayed for a good while because others were doing things with the gondola. We test-fitted our window baffle, the so-called "champagne bucket". Ilan, Hannes, and François worked on fixing some issues with our readout crates. Jeff did a lot of work on baffle supports. I cut some holes in foam and painted some sun-exposed metal on the gondola. And new people showed up: Greg from Brown, Sam from SISSA, Chaoyun and Kate from Minnesota, and Joy returned from a weekend with her parents. As if the high bay weren't crowded enough!

Now for the drama:

First, Governor Bill Richardson flew in to Fort Sumner. We have no idea why, but he landed in a small business jet, and what I think is the town's entire police force -- three cars -- came out to escort him to wherever he was going.

Second, our elevation actuator was replaced with our flight unit. Now, this normally doesn't sound very dramatic, and it shouldn't be. Unfortunately, the person who replaced the actuator forgot to remove the strap that was holding the inner frame in place while the actuator was removed. Now, I was not aware that there was a ratchet strap in place. Hilarity ensues: I move the actuator, and eventually the strap fails with a rather spectacular-sounding BANG, causing all work in the high bay to stop and everyone to gather around to find out what happened. Turns out the steel hook on the end of the strap bent considerably before the webbing itself failed, but nothing ended up damaged in the end.

Last, while painting some metal high up on the gondola, some paint was accidentally spilled onto the gondola below...and into the open ACS crate and its three ~$5000-each electronics boards. After this was discovered, there was a frantic effort to clean up the boards with isopropanol as much as possible. Still waiting to see if all's well...

EDIT: First indications are that the ACS is working.

Actually a fair number of pictures of me today, thanks to Dan who took a whole bunch while I was working:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico051209#

Day 47, 5/11/09 -- If it's not deadly, you're not trying hard enough

2009-05-11T22:40:00.000-07:00

Today was a busy day:

- The Mini-SIP, the NASA electronics package, was installed
- Jeff and Dan nearly finished the primary mirror 'scoop' baffles, and now it looks even bigger than before.
- Ilan and Shaul found a wiring issue with our LED calibrator, and we're trying to devise a workaround
- I prepared some of our outer baffles for a test fit tomorrow and got our 'champagne bucket' window baffle ready for a test fit
- Shaul modified our low-temperature readout boards for better linearity
- Late last night, Will did tests and settled on the final configuration for our garage door springs -- which I now have pictures of!

But the big news is that we are rapidly approaching 'turnaround' high-altitude wind conditions. The NASA crew have started doing flight projections for FIREBall, since they will likely be up first. Right now we are aiming to do our compatibility test on Thursday if the weather is reasonable and declare our flight readiness on Friday. As such, the next few days the posting may be a little light.

We also saw some more local fauna today -- a little frog and a big spider. Check 'em out in the pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico051109#

Day 46, 5/10/09 -- To boldly go...

2009-05-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

Today, Hannes, Dan, and Shaul finished up the last suite of optical/polarimetry calibration tests that need to be done! That means tomorrow, Jeff and I start work on getting the remaining baffles in place. It also means that, today, I had nothing to do. Shaul suggested I go to Clovis, about 60 miles away, so...I did, and saw the new Star Trek movie. I believe it's summarized most succinctly as: This movie is awesome. Go see it. You can thank me later.

When I got back, Daniel wanted me to take some photos of him rockin' his new cowboy hat and mustache, so I happily obliged.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico051009#

Day 45, 5/9/09 -- More testing

2009-05-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

Today was (and is still) devoted to optical/detector tests. Dan, Hannes, and Shaul are working hard on getting polarization rotation data across our focal plane.

In the meantime, things are breaking. Our GPS system has some sort of burned component inside and one of the receivers no longer works. And the analog channels of our so-called "general housekeeping" boards continue to be problematic.

My solution to our gondola balance issue, a set of garage door extension springs, seems to be working -- in fact, working a little too well! Before, our inner frame wanted to tip forward of its own accord; now, the springs are pulling up on the inner frame. We'll eventually find the sweet spot.

Because the gondola was being used today for optical tests, we couldn't do any more work on baffles. Jeff and I are planning on installing more baffles tomorrow, so we did some prep work for that today.

Not much more to report from here. No pictures today, but I have to remember to get a set of pictures of the garage door springs.

Day 44, 5/8/09 -- An angel gets its wings

2009-05-09T00:08:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I (along with occasional help from others) put the big sunshade baffle ears up. They're big. And shiny. And threaten to fall over if you look at them wrong. Launch should be fun.

I also had pretty much the most terrifying half hour of my life, standing/kneeling/crawling on top of the gondola drilling holes to attach one of the support bars for the aforementioned sunshade ears. Sure, I was in a safety harness and was clipped in, but I really didn't want to slip.

Other people did stuff today, but, honestly, it wasn't ginormous foam-and-mylar ears, so it's really not that important. Also, Shaul showed up again. Now he's here permanently until the end of the campaign.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050809#

Day 43, 5/7/09 -- Outdoor tests redux

2009-05-07T21:32:00.001-07:00

Last night's outdoor pointing system test was kind of a bust -- we got hosed by GPS problems and an arcane, undocumented convention in our flight scheduling code (inherited from another experiment), which meant the entire night was a confusing mess. Luckily, the weather is good tonight as well, so the ACS team is staying and NASA is taking us out once again for full system tests.

We were going to try to observe the moon with the millimeter-wave receiver, but that got shelved due to a programming glitch which caused the power to the bolometer readout to be accidentally shut off. It would have taken Hannes and François quite a bit of time to get the system back up and running again, so we decided to shelve that for the night and let the ACS team have the gondola for themselves the whole evening.

Jeff and I worked on getting the largest pieces of baffling ready to install, but we ran out of time and wouldn't have been able to get the pieces up before the ACS team needed the gondola.

We did see a cool lizard today -- looks like a Texas Horned Lizard. All three of today's pictures are of the lizard:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050709#

Day 42, 5/6/09 -- 40 days in the wilderness, now with snakes and explosions!

2009-05-07T03:15:00.000-07:00

Well, today certainly was an exciting day. Early in the day, Jeff saw a snake in the high bay. I thought it was cute, but it freaked Jeff out a bit. He started looking up snakes to try and figure out if it was poisonous but had no luck. Maybe one of my readers knows?

FIREBall had their compatibility test today, where CSBF makes sure that none of the science equipment interferes with their stuff. They will probably declare their flight readiness in a day or two.
During their compatibility test, we heard (and felt) a big BOOM -- it turns out that one of the FIREBall guys was hooking up some batteries from CREST and accidentally shorted them. The battery box started hissing, so he took it outside and set it on the ground where it exploded in spectacular fashion. There were pieces of the box and cells from the battery distributed over 200 feet apart. Luckily no one was hurt and no equipment was damaged.

Tonight was also the first clear night we've had in a while, so both us and FIREBall went outside to hang anddo some tests (for us, mostly pointing-related). I just got home at about 4AM, but some of the crew is still there.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050609#

Day 41, 5/5/09 -- "It's like, 'how much more black could it be?'"

2009-05-05T23:47:00.000-07:00

The answer is...some.

First, the big news today was that CREST finally launched! I didn't get up to watch, but some of the team members who were either still around or came in early got to see it. They launched around 8AM, drifted eastward while ascending toward Portales, and then started drifting westward when it got to its float altitude of about 130,000 feet. In fact, it basically drifted back toward Fort Sumner, at one point getting as close as 9 nautical miles (on the ground) to us, putting it about 27 (non-nautical) miles away line-of-sight. It was REALLY easy to see in the sky, and I put my mom's nice zoom lens to good use (see picture above). You can actually just make out the payload as a little white smudge below the balloon. They terminated just north of Roswell and it looks like they recovered the payload in the evening. Flight (and recovery?) track here -- it'll probably be gone by the time the next payload launches, though.

Ilan was in early to cycle our fridges and get detectors cold again so we can start the next round of detector/optical tests. Jeff and I implemented my awesome garage-door-spring solution to our inner frame balance issue and...well...it didn't completely work. It helped, but we need bigger springs. And I forgot to take pictures. Dan spent the day working on getting the artificial planet set up with his monachromator for the next round of tests while Hannes and François battled buggy code while trying to tune bolometers.

After dinner, we weighed the gondola: 5800 lbs with all batteries and an extra 50 or so lbs of power supplies but without about 100 lbs of baffles. Still, in pretty good shape since we thought we might be significantly over 6000 lbs. Then Jeff and I started applying millimeter-wave absorber to the optics 'cavity' around the cryostat and secondary mirror to control reflections. It's black, and we have a bit more to put on around the secondary and a lot more to put on around the primary, hence the answer that opened the post.

Also, this is my 50th post to this blog. To the nearly 200 unique visitors this site has had -- thanks! I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed posting.

CREST pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/CREST#

Today's EBEX pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050509#

Day 40, 5/04/09 -- Somewhat baffled

2009-05-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

After the last fridge cycle ran out late last night, we dedicated all of today to doing work that couldn't happen when other tests were going on. Besides various electronics and software tests, the big change is that we have some of the inner frame baffles in! It looks...sort of ridiculous, but in an awesome way. I'll just let the picture do the talking:
On a side note, it happens fairly frequently that I come home with random bits of hardware in my pocket -- usually things like screws, nuts, washers, or the like. Today is the first time ever that I've gotten home with pop rivets in my pocket.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050409#

Day 39, 5/3/09 -- "Layers of deception"

2009-05-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

Thus spake Dan, whilst describing the data pouring in on our computer screens. Dan and Hannes have been working all day on doing artificial planet scans but were stymied by drifting pointing sensors making them think they were pointed at the source but when in reality they weren't. Such is life when you're indoors with no reliable absolute pointing sensors. Will showed some plots of maps made from the previous day's scans and they looked terrible -- but that's probably at least partially due to the aforementioned pointing drift issue, which smears the maps out.

Jeff and I finished up most of the foam for the baffles today. I also made some snazzy sheet metal baffle supports, and I have to say, working with sheet metal is great for instant gratification. Unlike machining, which takes a lot of time as you remove metal and the piece slowly comes to shape, with sheet metal things move much more quickly: One step on the shear -- KACHUNK -- and you've cut a piece off. 10 seconds in the brake and you've bent a 90-degree angle. It's a lot of fun.

Michele took a much needed day off in Albuquerque starting yesterday afternoon, and came back in the late afternoon today. Also, CREST is planning launch attempts tomorrow morning and Tuesday morning if tomorrow doesn't work out. I probably won't bother to get up, though, because at this point sleep is more important than watching a launch at 7AM.

No pictures today. Everything looks pretty much the same as it did yesterday.

Day 38, 5/2/09 -- system tests underway

2009-05-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

The astute reader will notice that I've stopped giving weather updates. That's because it's mostly always the same -- sunny, warm, and windy. Today, however, it was actually cloudy and it even rained a bit. Even so, we actually got to play some 3-on-3 basketball with the help of Daniel, a Berkeley grad student working on NCT, and they were our best basketball games yet.

Now that the telescope has both mirrors on, we can actually, you know, make sure it works. Actually, even last night, shortly after I left, I found out via a Facebook status update that the telescope was actually able to see our 'artificial planet' and they were taking data to make beam maps. Awesome.

That work continued today, while Will worked on code to actually produce a beam map from previously-taken data. Our elevation drive developed an odd pathology where every so often it would cease to work until someone tapped on the motor lightly. I surmised that the problem was excess brush wear: The motor has high-altitude brushes, which are softer than normal brushes so they arc less (and thus also produce less RF -- bonus!) but wear much more quickly. After I tweaked the brush springs a little bit, it seems that the problem has been fixed.

Jeff spent all day today working on baffles, helped out today by Jerry. They've gotten a LOT done. Almost all of the foam is cut, and they're now well into the process of covering the baffles with aluminized mylar.

I've still been feeling the effects of lack of sleep, with nearly-constant low-grade headaches for the past few days. Today, I went home early and made myself dinner for which I had bought stuff for earlier in the week but hadn't had a chance to make -- a ribeye steak, a potato gratin (sort-of), and a salad. And now, I'm going to bed.

Updates to yesterday's albums, including pictures from Milligan who took lots of pictures while I was busy helping with the secondary mirror install
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050109#

Today's pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050209#

Day 37, 5/1/09 -- a fully operational battle station.

2009-05-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

In short: We have a telescope!

For the second day in a row, the CREST launch attempt was scrubbed due to high mid-altitude winds. The weather's going to be pretty bad for the next few days, so probably no more launch attempts for a while.

After fighting a bit with the mirror alignment procedure, Shaul, Britt, and I managed to get the primary mirror mount aligned. In parallel, Dan and Michele worked on getting the artificial planet mounted.

Jeff worked for most of the day on getting foam cut for the baffles. I took a little trip to Clovis to get some supplies for the balance-weight-reduction mechanism (i.e. big-ass springs). I also went to Lowe's for some other supplies for the baffles and brought pizza back for the lab crew.

Once I got back, Britt, Michele and I, with the help of Joy operating the crane, mounted the secondary mirror. We had to fight with it a bit in order to get it on -- a redesign of the mirror mount produced some interference with the secondary mirror's stiffening ribs, meaning I got to take an angle grinder to the backside of our $100,000 secondary mirror. Twice. No biggie.

We already knew from our Nevis experience that putting the primary mirror on is actually much easier, so I took a little break and when I got back, the mirror was on! Dan and Michele then started the process of aligning the artificial planet beam with the EBEX telescope beam, guided by a "laser". This was nearly 11PM, and I went home.

Unfortunately I don't have all of my pictures from today because I left the DSLR's memory card and card reader in the lab (usually I copy the files over before coming home). You'll just have to make do until tomorrow with the few I took with my little Canon ELPH:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico050109#

Day 36, 4/30/09 -- I can has EBEX pls?

2009-04-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

Now that the entire experiment is together and running off of one flight computer, there's been a bit of pushing and shoving for access to the gondola and flight computer. Some people want to debug code, others want to run detectors, others want to do scan tests, etc, so it's become a bit of a logistical hassle coordinating work. It hasn't been too bad yet, but we'll see how it goes in the future.

Last night, during the scan tests, Will and others added 200 lb of balancing weight to the cryostat to allow the elevation drive to work properly. Of course, this is 200 lb we can't really spare, so I'm trying to come up with a solution that will save us weight but still allow reliable elevation motion.

Other work that went on today: Some work on fixing some little electronics issues, Ilan cycled our fridges so our detectors are now cold, Hannes and François are working on tuning SQUIDs and detectors, Dan and Michele got a lot of work done on setting up the artificial planet, and Shaul and I are having lots of problems with mirror alignment.

CREST might launch tomorrow (sort of marginal conditions), but I'll be here early anyway to do more work on the mirror alignment with Shaul before he heads back to Minnesota.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico043009#

Day 35, 4/29/09 -- This post intentionally left blank

2009-04-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

No 'real' post today. I've hit a wall of tiredness and decided that the time I normally use to sort through pictures and write a blog post would be better spent sleeping.

Nothing interesting happened today anyway.

Day 34, 4/28/09 -- Cryostat meets Doc Ock

2009-04-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

Last night, after the installation of the cryostat, the gondola was handed over to Will, Joy, and Daniel for more ACS/scan tests. At some point in the very early morning, it seems that our elevation drive system malfunctioned and overheated. We're still investigating the cause of this, but we have both a spare motor and actuator

After starting the installation of electronics crates yesterday, that work continued today. For a while, everything was on, but Ilan found a short in one of the bolometer power crates so that had to come off for debugging. François basically spent the entire day on the gondola getting detector cables in place and getting our RF shielding 'dryer hose' buttoned up. Now the cryostat looks a little bit like Doc Ock from Spiderman.

After I dealt with a whole bunch of administrative stuff in the morning and then having our weekly telecon, Shaul and I worked on mirror mount alignment. On the first attempt, we were able to get the mount to within 0.050" or so of its nominal position -- not bad for trying to align two things that are roughly 50" apart, but not actually good enough for what we need (less than 0.020". The two mirrors are roughly 90" apart, and need to be aligned to the same tolerance!) . After puzzling over this for a few hours, we couldn't come up with a good reason for why the alignment procedure didn't work, so we're probably just going to try again tomorrow.

The weather here turned windy and rainy so CREST wasn't able to launch today. However, the weather the next couple of days is supposed to be better, so maybe they'll launch Thursday? We were informed that the high-altitude-wind 'turnaround' will reach New Mexico in about 2 weeks, after which there will be a 1-2 week period of relatively low-speed high-altitude winds. This corresponds well with our planned flight readiness date.

Also, now I can officially say I've been here over a month (for any month of the year!). We've made a ton of progress, but there's still a lot left to do and we're going into over-overtime mode to get everything done. As if we weren't getting enough sleep...

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042809#

Day 33, 4/27/09 -- Cryostat and gondola, together again for the first time.

2009-04-27T19:25:00.001-07:00

The big news today is that we got the cryostat installed on the gondola. We had done it before, last year at our pre-flight integration at Columbia's Nevis lab, but now it's for real.

All in all, it was a pretty smooth process. Since we've done it before once, we knew what to expect, and it took only a little bit longer than I predicted (four hours instead of three, start to finish). We then started the process of aligning our mirror mounts, installing detector readout electronics on the gondola, and just general "get it working"-ness.

Also, with the cryostat on the gondola, we were able to clear up a ton of floor space in the high bay, which we'll need when we do full telescope tests with our 'artificial planet'.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042709#

Day 32, 4/25 -- The calm before the storm

2009-04-26T21:27:00.000-07:00

Since the detectors are still cold, Dan and others spent a lot of today doing calibration tests. I'm happy to report that they were able to get all of the major tests done -- another big milestone, and what will hopefully be a big part of Dan's thesis! Great job, Dan.

I spent most of today thinking about the baffles -- mostly, how are we going to attach all of this crazy crap to the gondola and have it not fall apart. We have a plan, and some of the last bits of material will be ordered shortly.

I also spent some time today playing around with Google Analytics. I had set up an Analytics account for this blog a few days after I started it but then forgot completely until I was reminded by a post over at Uncertain Principles. With it, we found out that Jeff's mom not only checks this blog from work but also from their cabin (hi Jeff's mom!), and someone from Estonia has come (once). Also, apparently some of the CSBF people in Palestine, TX read the blog too. I was, uh, just kidding about having driven the forklift...

No pictures today. But tomorrow, we put the cryostat and gondola together (for the 2nd time), and then things get really fun. Stay tuned...

Day 31, 4/25/09 -- The day after

2009-04-25T21:35:00.000-07:00

Last night's test of the gondola/ACS was, by all accounts, a resounding success. The ACS team got the gondola scanning back and forth, with all of the sensors working, downlinking data over the transmitters and commanding through the telemetry system -- the whole works. Really awesome. Great job guys and gals! Also, big props to the NASA crew who stayed all night to support the effort.

Since I left early last night (2AM as opposed to ~9AM for the ACS team), the high bay was relatively deserted. Hannes flew back to Minnesota today for a little break, so François, Ilan, and Dan were the only other people in the high bay all morning besides me and Jeff. Dan continued doing calibration tests, and we had quite a scare when it seemed that some of Dan's data (a few hours worth!) accidentally got deleted from the computer's hard drive! It turns out that, besides there being another copy of the data on another computer (albeit in a less-accessible form), it turns out the data files weren't even deleted in the first place. Whew!

Shaul showed up today as well, and proceeded to get a rundown on the status of all major systems from the relevant parties. Jeff and I spent a fair part of the afternoon painting some of the exposed metal on the gondola. It turns out that, in the near-space environment of a high-altitude balloon, the sun can warm up bare aluminum to hundreds of degrees Celsius! Painting it white not only reduces the amount of sunlight absorbed, but also increases the amount of heat that can be radiated away, keeping the entire thing cool. Pretty neat!

A few pictures today at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042509#

Day 30, 4/24/09 Part 2 -- Day 30 Strikes Back!

2009-04-25T01:19:00.000-07:00

After going home to try and get some rest (and failing miserably, on my part), we went back to the high bay to help the gondola/ACS crew roll the experiment out and have it picked up and deposited away from the building to calibrate sensors and do scan tests.

I should point out that this is HUGE. This is the first time EBEX has ever been outside. It's the first time we have all of the sensors. It's the first time we're talking to EBEX and having it do things over the flight telemetry link.

Jeff and I went back mainly for manpower support. I ended up driving our articulated boom arm to make the crane connections/disconnections because it's way easier to get that thing in place than NASA's bucket lift. And, of course, we took lots of pictures. The new pictures in today's album were taken by me, Britt, Joy, and Jeff.

Check 'em out:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042409#

Day 30, 4/24/09 -- EBEX in Flight, early edition

2009-04-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

Tonight, we're planning on doing a full outdoor test of the gondola's attitude control system, so some of us have come back to try and get a little rest before heading back to the high bay to meet up with the NASA peeps.

Jeff learned how to operate our cherry picker so he could replace some bolts on the triangle support that we installed yesterday. I saw the launch vehicle driving around this morning in preparation for activities tonight.

We (meaning Will and the NASA guys) were able to get our computers talking with the NASA equipment -- a critical interface needed for flight. Not only that, we can now send commands from our computers wirelessly, and receive data from the transmitters as well! Pretty sweet, if I do say so.

Just a few pictures today (so far, I'll probably get a lot more tonight). Bonus video of the launch vehicle driving around!
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042409#

Day 29, 4/23/09 -- This title intentionally left blank

2009-04-23T21:19:00.000-07:00

Today we achieved a pretty big milestone: We installed what we call the "triangle support", some long aluminum bars at funny angles that are intended to hold up parts of gondola when the experiment lands. Jeff and I spent a lot of time on these parts, both in machining as well as in fixing some manufacturing mistakes, so it was very satisfying to see it all come together.

The triangle support is one component that is important for the planned attitude control system test that the gondola team wants to do this weekend, before the cryostat and gondola meet. The gondola team is working hard to make this test happen, and the cryostat team is working hard to make sure we can get all of our receiver tests done. To that end, I cycled our sub-Kelvin refrigeration systems today while Hannes and Dan prepared to do tests.

I took a few minutes out of the day to try and sharpen the crappiest knife edge I've ever seen. I bought the knife from the local supermarket, and straight out of the box it was pretty much useless. So I took it over to the bench grinder in the machine shop and, after a few attempts got what looked like a reasonable edge. Once I got home, I tried it out and, wouldn't you know it, it actually cuts now! Kind of amazing, given that I'd never sharpened a knife before.

Also, we lowered the adjustable hoop outside our high bay door and had some fun pretending to be NBA superstars. Check it out in the pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042309#

Day 28, 4/22/09 -- Booms, bugs, and bolometers

2009-04-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

The weather here in NM is finally becoming what I expected New Mexico weather to be like: hot! Today it got up to nearly 90 degrees, and it was glorious. Of course, with the heat come bugs. We've seen a marked increase in the numbers of flies, moths, and other various kinds of bugs around the high bay. Strangely, all of the bugs here are VERY slow. I was actually able to just step on a fly a couple of days ago.

We got some new additions to the team today, and one subtraction. François drove Kevin to Albuquerque so he could fly back to Montreal, spent the day there, and then drove back with Ilan and Will, who both arrived last night. Once back in the high bay, they jumped right in to work. Will quickly fixed a configuration issue we were having with the serial ports on the flight computer. Dan spent the day taking data with the Ebert-Fastie monochromator he built, getting information on the receiver's spectral response. I spent a good part of the day working on the baffling mechanical design.

The big news here today was the arrival of our rented articulated boom lift. Let me tell you: This thing is FUN. We need it to do some calibration/systematics tests as well as eventually to deal with the gondola once all of its structure is in place. Speaking of structure, Jeff and I have spent a lot of time over the past few days dealing with what I can only assume are manufacturing or design errors in some of the parts for the gondola structure. Making what should be a simple task (bolting a couple of things together) difficult by having to fix others' mistakes is a great way to make a good day turn into an annoying and frustrating one.

Last, Dan had Ilan pick up a new rim for the sad basketball hoop just outside our high bay door. The new one is straight and round and actually has a net! We played a good amount of basketball today, and Britt even got in on the action for a little 3-on-3. Now we have two hoops to choose from. Maybe eventually we'll wheel our hoop over to where the new hoop is and set up a full court!

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042209#

Day 27, 4/21/09 -- Just a day in the life

2009-04-21T22:24:00.000-07:00

Nothing particularly exciting happened today. We had our weekly telecon today, which is always fun. Milligan thinks he found a bug that's causing our flight computer to crash. Dan started some more calibration experiments today and is working on them tonight as well. Britt and Michele investigated some oddness in the gondola elevation drive. I spent a lot of the day trying to figure out how the rough idea for our extensive baffling's support structure will actually translate into a physically realizable structure, and I think I've got the basics worked out. We should be able to order metal soon.

Yesterday, I met Bill Stepp, who is the head of CSBF flight operations. Apparently, when he comes out, the flight season is getting close. He told us today that CREST, who showed up over the weekend, are looking to launch as early as next Tuesday! It must be nice to have an experiment that's that easy to put together. Then again...no guts, no glory!

The new basketball hoop is ready for use too. It's much less forgiving than the old one outside our door, which of course means that Dan just gained an even bigger advantage over the rest of us hacks. To inaugurate, Dan, Hannes, and I played a game of 21 -- and I won! Total luck, for sure, but I'll take it.

Also, I got new shoes. My old ones were falling apart, so I ordered a pair from Zappos -- the same exact model as my previous ones (Adidas Samba Milleniums, size 10.5 if you must know). I think they're the only things in New Mexico that aren't covered in dust (yet). What really sucks, though, is that I have two more brand new pairs waiting for me in Minnesota -- I just figured I wouldn't need them. Oops.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042109#

Day 26, 4/20/09 -- We eschew pseudo-breezes*.

2009-04-20T18:29:00.000-07:00

Today was a productive day in the high bay -- well, at least it was for Jeff and myself. Basically, what it comes down to is that we kick ass at building stuff. We have basically all of the gondola protection hardware completed (it's missing a few rivets, which are on their way from McMaster-Carr). We also got the sexy carbon-fiber GPS mount completely done -- the glue is drying as I write this.

The detector guys were still doing tests today before handing the system over to Dan for calibration work. I think they were trying to get as much as possible done before Kevin leaves and Ilan returns and Will shows up.

The EBEX crew gained another house, and tonight we're going over there to hang out -- it's on Lake Sumner, and they have a pool table! First, though, a quick dinner of mac and cheese and then await Britt's call so she can ferry us out there.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico042009#

*We live on Real Wind Drive.

Day 25, 4/19/09 -- One step back, six steps forward.

2009-04-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

Last night, I stayed late to cycle the helium adsorption refrigerators in our cryostat while Daniel and Joy did scan tests. When I was nearly done, we noticed that the gondola started making a horrific noise when moving in elevation. We decided that we would cease any tests involving elevation motion until Michele and Britt had a chance to give it a listen in the morning. I went home at 3 AM or so; the other two stayed until about 7:30 AM(!).

In the morning, Michele and Britt checked and found it was making the same kinds of noises as it did once before when there was some wear and debris in the trunnion bearing. So...off with it's head! The inner frame had to be removed so the bearings could be inspected and repairs effected.

In the meantime, we were able to get a lot of work done on the gondola. Jeff, Michele, and Britt finished the last bit of drilling and bolting for the primary mirror rollbar. I started Jeff off on making a mount for our sun sensor while I started work on the GPS mount -- first, a slight redesign of the geometry to give more clearance for the launch vehicle and then drilling of some more holes. I had Jeff cut the carbon-fiber tubes to length while I -- yep, you guessed it, drilled some more holes (in the antenna backplanes). We were able to get the entire GPS mount assembly mocked up and basically ready for gluing.

Michele and Britt found a small chip of aluminum in one of the trunnion bearings, most likely from all of the drilling we've been doing on the inner frame. They removed it and smoothed out the damage and the inner frame went back on by the end of the day.

On the detector front, the detector team was working on getting the system back up to speed after the fridge cycle. Hannes reports that François was able to tune all of the SQUIDs in the system with a single command from his computer. Neat! While that was happening, Dan kept plugging away at setting up all of our calibration experiments.

Around the base, there's been some changes. The FIREBall team is basically all set up and ready for flight -- the personnel have tucked everything out of the way until their flight, and have left the premises seemingly until then. And another experiment showed up today: CREST, a cosmic ray telescope. I think they're planning to be flight-ready in about 2 weeks!

Jeff and I left the high bay early tonight -- 9PM. Jeff points out that it is indeed a sad state of affairs when 9PM qualifies as an "early night".

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041909#

Day 24, 4/18/09 -- Hot at any wavelength

2009-04-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

Today was a productive day here at the high bay. The most noticeable change to the gondola is that it's now received some new hardware -- Jeff and I spent most of the day building up the rollbar for the primary mirror. Robin from CSBF spent the day lightweighting some additional hardware for the triangle support structure (this probably means nothing to those who don't know the construction of the gondola...but whatever, I'm leaving it in), and Michele got started on cleaning up and installing those parts once we got them back.

Joy and Daniel have been working the late shift lately, taking the advantage of the night to do scan tests with the star camera. Because we still have cold detectors, Dan started doing some of our baseline calibration tests (optical efficiency, rough beam checks, etc). The McGilligans have been probably writing detector tuning algorithms or something like that. What the hell do I know?

The big news today was our ice cream party -- Britt's husband arranged with the local grocery store to provide us with a veritable cornucopia of ice creams. Five or six different flavors and a variety of toppings, all brought to the high bay and set up by Dave, the owner of Dave's Venture Foods and former mayor of Fort Sumner. It was a great way to take a short break in the afternoon and enjoy some ice cream and the great weather.

It's currently about 11:15PM and Joy, Daniel, and I are still in the high bay. I'm cycling fridges so detectors will be ready to use in the morning, and the kids are doing more scan tests.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041809#
Also, be sure to check out a couple pictures that Milligan took yesterday that I posted in that day's album.

Day 23, 4/17/09 -- Worst. Helium. Transfer. Ever.

2009-04-17T21:18:00.000-07:00

Today, work continued (what else?). We drilled some holes in the gondola to mount the protection hardware, Dan and Hannes started doing calibration experiments. Michele did some work on the rotator to add a tilt-meter and a connector for the slip-ring.

Of course, it being Friday, we went to the hamburger stand for catfish and shrimp -- and this time, I took my camera!

The highlight -- or lowlight -- of the day was our comical attempt to try and get the last remaining little bits of liquid helium out of the two dewars we had left. Basically, it didn't work. Luckily, our new 500L dewar to replace the empty ones we got yesterday showed up during our attempts to fill -- perfect timing. We just gave up on the little bits we had left (it wasn't going well anyway) and went whole hog with the new arrival. Much easier.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041709#

Brr.

2009-04-16T22:01:00.001-07:00

It's kinda cold in the high bay. FIREBall has their door open for star camera tests, and we have our door open about a foot, also for star camera tests, and there's a cold breeze flowing through. I might need to start wearing pants to the high bay.

Instead of shorts, I mean.

Day 22, 4/16/09 -- Problems and solutions

2009-04-16T20:40:00.000-07:00

Today started off with the gondola crew trying to figure out some oddness in the reaction wheel motor control. After lots of head-scratching, confusing tests, and emails across the pond, Michele finally noticed that the cables to the motor weren't plugged in all the way. The intermittent connection was enough to cause all sorts of non-repeatable weirdness.

This illustrates a point I often make: 90% of physics is trying to connect one thing to another. It could be a mechanical connection, electrical, thermal, data -- whatever. The hard part about experimental physics is always in the interfaces.

Jeff worked for most of today on his half-wave plate control system. I got started with the mounting hardware for the gondola protection stuff, though the gondola team was messing around with the gondola for much of the day so I didn't get a chance to drill some holes I need to drill. Perhaps tomorrow. Dan, who arrived last night from Minnesota, started setting up his calibration experiments.

The detector team is working hard on understanding the detectors we have operational. The fridges are still cold from yesterday, at about 260 mK. We had a bit of a snafu with our liquid helium order, though: When the truck was loaded, whoever loaded it neglected to secure our liquid helium dewars. Two of the three dewars fell over, the third was free to roll about on its casters in the back of the truck. Out of the 300L we were supposed to receive, we had only 28L delivered. Because we'll run out of helium in the cryostat on ~Sunday, probably, NASA is working hard to get us more by Saturday. Fingers crossed!

On the bright side, the NASA crew was working hard today on a very important improvement to the site: A new basketball hoop! Hopefully it'll be ready to use tomorrow.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041609#

Day 21, 4/15/09 -- Tax day!

2009-04-15T20:30:00.001-07:00

Another gorgeous day in New Mexico.

Today Jeff and I started the process of cutting metal for the gondola protection hardware. I say "Jeff and I", but really it was just Jeff. We figured out what needed to be done, but he actually was the one in the machine shop all afternoon and evening. I spent the better part of the day trying to place an order from my favorite industrial supply company, McMaster-Carr. I had to go through the gondola model and figure out exactly what kind and how many screws were needed for the structure we're building. I also did a bit of FEA on some mechanical parts that are clearly WAY overkill; hopefully we'll be able to remove a bunch of material and save some weight.

I also finally got the liquid helium level sensor working, using the current source on the dedicated level sensor board built at Weizmann. Using this board, we measured the liquid helium boiloff to be about a 12 liters per day, for a total hold time of about 5.5 days -- more than enough for an at-most-36-hour flight.

The gondola team has been having a frustrating day -- things that used to work don't anymore, and they've been working hard to try and figure it out. The detector crew came in to find all the power to the readout system gone -- turns out a fuse had blown overnight and they had to spend some time this morning getting everything back in an operational state.

The most exciting news for today is that I got my very own cowboy hat. It's an Atwood Low Hereford 7X, size 7-3/8. And I'll be damned if it doesn't look good on me.

Pictures are pretty meager today. Sorry.
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041509#

Day 20, 4/14/09 -- Cold at last, cold at last...

2009-04-14T22:37:00.000-07:00

Another gorgeous but windy day here in New Mexico, it was sunny with a high of nearly 80 degrees. Britt also returned last night from her short trip home to New York -- we actually saw her driving to the high bay when we left last night, and she ended up staying VERY late helping the rest of the gondola/ACS crew fix some problems. Welcome back, Britt!

This morning when we came in, we found that everything in the cryostat had reached about 4K, meaning we could run our sub-Kelvin refrigeration system and actually get working detectors. We also have our weekly telecon on Tuesdays, so we gave the rest of the group an update on activities here in Fort Sumner. Some subset of us also attended a gondola-specific telecon a half-hour after the aptly-named 'general' telecon ended.

We received some parts and materials for extra gondola structure we're adding to make working with the gondola easier as well as help protect some of the more-important components (mirrors, mostly) on landing. Jeff machined some parts for this today and we'll continue to work on it tomorrow as well. We also noticed that some of the parts were ridiculously overbuilt and we came up with a design for light-weighting those parts.

A couple of times today the FIREBall team wanted the lights out so they could do tests with their star-tracking camera. This isn't too much of a problem for us, and it made for some decent pictures. Here I am holding still while working at my computer so Michele could get his 1-second exposure without it being totally blurry.

The detector team is going to have a late night in the high bay now that they have cold detectors. Suckers.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041409#

Day 19, 4/13/05 -- The road to 250 mK

2009-04-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

After a restful (hah!) weekend, work continues in the high bay. The cryogen boiloff situation has settled down substantially, and when I came in this morning I calculated roughly a liter per hour boiloff rate -- and things are still cooling. Based on the last run, though, we won't be ready to cool detectors until the 15th.

I spent a good part of the morning talking to Mark from CSBF regarding rigging and ballast hoppers. We checked with the CSBF electronics crew and it looks like we'll be able to put the ballast hoppers along the sides of the battery table, perhaps saving as much as 2 feet in height compared to mounting them at the bottom -- height that can be then used to lower our payload and provide much-needed clearance to our GPS antenna structure.

We noticed that the pressure in the cryostat has been slowly creeping upward starting yesterday, from a few microTorr to about 10-15 microTorr. Worried that there was a leak, we decided to leak check once more now that the pressure is low enough to check in the leak checker's more sensitive range. Luckily, we didn't find a leak, but we're still puzzled as to the origin of this strange increase. Also, I drove one of the NASA forklifts -- that was fun.

Jerry and Daniel stayed late last night after the clouds cleared and were able to take some images with the star camera that will be useful for debugging. Milligan found this morning that our spare flight computer board has been acting flaky and will need replacement. The gondola team also is finding that they're having issues with the serial ports on the flight computer crate and are actively investigating that (even as of now, roughly 11 PM). And the detector gang has been looking at SQUID noise in various hardware configurations of the instrument.

Luckily, while we've been waiting for the focal plane to cool, the weather has been nice: High 60's, fairly sunny, and not too much wind. Makes for good basketball weather. Sadly, it doesn't make for good basketball players -- watching a bunch of physicists play basketball is fairly comical.

Today's pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041309#

Day 18, 4/12/09 -- EBEX is risen!

2009-04-12T22:48:00.000-07:00

This morning, Jeff and I once again got up way too early to fill the cryostat. I had set my alarm to wake up at 5AM, but I figured I could sleep a little longer and set the countdown timer on my phone for 10 minutes more and went back to sleep. Luckily I woke up about 25 minutes later, at which point I realized that I accidentally set my timer to count down for 10 hours. Oops. It ended up working out fine; I got up and woke Jeff up and we headed to the high bay, where we found that the cryostat boiloff had slowed during the night and we had plenty of helium left.

We filled anyway, and over the course of the day the boiloff dropped even further, down to 2.6 liters per hour as of the last measurement. For reference, last time we cooled it down, the cryostat boiled off roughly 0.5 liters per hour. Fun fact: Liquid helium costs about $4/liter in Minnesota, and probably more here in NM because it has to be delivered from Texas. We have already currently used nearly 900 liters of liquid helium just to get the cryostat to this point; we will probably go through another 700-1000 liters by the time we get to fly. So figure at least $6400 in liquid helium alone. Science is expensive.

I spent most of the day trying to get our liquid helium level sensor to work. I fixed the issue I had yesterday, but it still wasn't working. Later, I discovered that the power supply I was using to run the level sensor was acting funny, meaning we won't have a level sensor unless we use a different power supply (something I'll look into tomorrow).

Ilan and Matt spent the day continuing to debug the low-temperature thermometer readout electronics, while Hannes and the McGilligans looked at SQUIDs and worked on detector software. Jeff and Ilan worked on idiot-proofing the half-wave plate commanding, and Jeff had the HWP spinning at roughly 2 Hz by the end of the day today.

The ACS team of Michele, Daniel, and Joy was able to get the gondola pointing using the magnetometer for feedback (Britt is back in New York for a long weekend). They had been trying to do this for the past couple of days, but the magnetometer was giving funny readings. They finally figured out that the floor of the high bay is somehow interfering with the earth's magnetic field (possibly the steel re-bar in the floor), and so by raising the magnetometer up to the top of the gondola they were able to get sensible readings and move the gondola back and forth.

All in all, a pretty productive Easter Sunday for the EBEX crew in New Mexico. And to think, some people took the whole weekend off.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041209#

Day 17, 4/11/09 -- Cowboys

2009-04-11T21:10:00.001-07:00

After our late-night fill, Jeff and I got up at 7AM for our planned field trip (Milligan got up too; we dropped him off at the high bay at 7:30). We were invited by the guy we're renting our house from to attend a calf branding on his son-in-law's cattle ranch. After driving for ~20 miles on dirt roads, we arrived at the pen where about 15 ranchers and ranch hands were well into the process of lassoing, vaccinating, castrating, tagging, and branding roughly-4-month-old calves.

The men there were remarkably efficient -- a guy on a horse would lasso a calf by the hind leg and drag it over to where 3 guys were waiting. One would give the calf a good shove on the shoulder with a boot while another grabbed it by the tail and whipped it over to get the calf on its side. Another guy would grab a foreleg and put his knee on the calf's neck while the guy who grabbed the tail then got a hold of a hind leg, removed the lasso, and immobilized the back end of the animal with his foot. Then four other guys would swarm in -- one with a vaccination gun, one with a gun for putting RFID tags in the calf's ear, one with the branding iron, and one with a knife. The guy with the knife slices off the bull's scrotum and presses on the calf's abdomen to get the testicles to pop out, and then he just slices them off. The calf, needless to say, doesn't like this one bit...but once released, the calf just went about his business as if nothing happened.

The guys there were VERY skilled -- they would shift jobs, but usually the younger ones were doing the roping, holding, and castration while the older ones dealt with the vaccination and tagging. All of them seemed to be very proficient riders -- in fact, everyone there, including the kids of a couple of the guys there, were excellent riders. All of the help were just neighboring ranchers, and they help each other out every time this sort of thing needs to be done. Afterward, we had lunch (prepared by our landlord, the rancher's father-in-law) and chatted with them for a bit. All in all, it was a great way to spend the morning and see something that I thought only existed in movies these days.

When we got to the high bay, we found people working hard. Milligan managed to reconfigure the high bay's networking hardware to make our internet connection to the outside world MUCH faster. In the morning, Michele gave our massively over-designed truck plate to the CSBF machinist here who removed a whole bunch of metal as well as added holes to better interface with the CSBF rigging. We filled helium and then Hannes and François needed to fix some cables so we lifted the whole cryostat plus cart up with the crane and set it on our scaffolding so it wouldn't move around (with the crane still connected, of course). While they worked on cables, Matt, Ilan, and sometimes myself worked on understanding some issues with our low-temperature thermometry electronics. Jeff and Ilan got most of the functionality of commanding the half-wave plate electronics figured out, and Jeff and I fixed a small issue with the new elevation actuator mount. It looks visually like the helium boiloff may finally be settling down -- perhaps one more late-night/early-morning fill tonight, but hopefully no more after that.

Ranch pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/CarterRanchBranding041109#
Lab pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041109#

Tired...of playing...ze game!

2009-04-11T01:15:00.000-07:00

It's 2:15 AM and Jeff and I are back in the high bay to fill helium. We found that the cryostat had run out about 20 minutes before we arrived and the cold plate temperature had slowly drifted up to 8K or so. We also found Jerry, Joy, and Daniel in the high bay -- they had wanted to do star camera tests but were thwarted by clouds rolling in.

Bonus points for anyone who recognizes the post title quote...

Day 16, 4/10/09 -- 4.2K here we come!

2009-04-10T21:40:00.000-07:00

Wow, has it really been 2 weeks? It really only feels like 12 or 13 days, tops.

Today was an eventful day for everyone in the high bay. Matt Dobbs from McGill (Kevin and François' advisor) arrived late last night and showed up at the high bay for the first time this morning. Shaul left around 10 AM to drive to Albuquerque for his flight back to Minnesota.

In the morning we talked to the CSBF guys Hugo and Mark about modifications to our truck plate to allow it to mate more easily with their launch hardware. The modifications should be quick and may even save us nearly 10 desperately-needed pounds.

Jeff and I filled the cryostat with liquid helium today. The first step in this process was removing the liquid nitrogen from the helium tank, accomplished by dropping a tube to the bottom of the tank and then pressurizing the tank to force the liquid out the tube. Once the nitrogen was gone, we were able to fill with helium. I worked on fixing our liquid helium level sensor, but I messed up and it's too long, and I'll have to fix it tomorrow.

Joy and Daniel spent the day working on the ACS sensors, culminating in suspending the gondola for preliminary scan tests. They're planning on staying late tonight to do some tests with the star camera. François and Hannes worked on getting the detector hardware ready to go while Matt and Kevin worked on software.

Because we've filled with helium, the superconducting bearing holding the half-wave plate can cool below its transition temperature. Shortly before we left for the evening, Jeff ungripped the HWP and was able to rotate the system inside the cryostat by hand from the outside shaft feedthrough -- a critical first test passed!

Because things inside the cryostat are still cooling, we have to fill helium fairly often as we draw the heat out of the components inside. Thus, Jeff and I will be headed back to the lab at about 4AM to fill the helium tank again. Hopefully we'll only have to do this once, and as a reward to ourselves we'll be taking a field trip in the morning -- but I'm not going to give away the surprise for those who don't already know...

As promised, more pictures today:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico041009#

Day 15, 4/9/09

2009-04-09T23:18:00.000-07:00

Today was wicked windy once again -- constant 30mph winds with gusts up to 45-50mph.

The cryostat is still cooling. It looks like we might be able to fill helium late tomorrow. I spent most of today in various meetings. Jeff got his electronics crate mounted to its home at the front of the cryostat mounting structure. Joy and Daniel worked on indexing our attitude control sensors after having mounted them all to the gondola.

The big news today was dinner. Since Shaul is leaving until after classes finish, we decided to have a dinner at our house, and we did it RIGHT. I made ribs; Jeff made stuffed peppers, Milligan made cornbread, Michele made sauce to go with pasta, and Britt made both hors d'oeuvres and dessert. After enjoying all of the food and a spirited debate on religion vs. atheism and the nature of scientific thought (which I checked out of pretty early on after making some fairly inflammatory remarks). Afterwards, we played Mafia, and good times were had by all.
Unfortunately, since I was basically in meetings all day, I didn't take any pictures from the high bay. I took a few after we came home, but it's a pretty meager gallery today. Sorry -- I'll try to do better tomorrow.

http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico040909#

Day 14, 4/8/09 -- the cooldown begins

2009-04-08T23:36:00.000-07:00

Today we made the necessary preparations for cooling down the EBEX cryostat. We still had some concerns about the cryostat's pump-down rate, so we leak-checked again this morning and again found nothing untoward. It seems that our rental turbopump is just kind of slow.

Hannes spent the day installing SQUID controller boards onto the cryostat and installing all of the necessary cabling inside the RF-tight enclosure at the bottom of the cryostat. I attended our mission planning meeting with CSBF where we laid out our requirements and desires for the flight and worked on a model of the launch vehicle geometry so we can figure out how much height we have to play with.

At the end of the day, we started pre-cooling the cryostat, filling both the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium tanks with liquid nitrogen. This was uneventful, as planned, and the next day or so will be waiting for the relatively-isolated cold optics inside the cryostat to cool down.

Also, cowboy hats are awesome. I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy one tomorrow.

Pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico040809#

Day 13, 4/7/09 -- tilting at wind turbines

2009-04-07T21:58:00.000-07:00

After yesterday's long day of cryostat work, we decided to sleep in a bit. The day started off with excellent breakfast burritos that Jeff and I made at our house which included a beef chorizo made with awesome bits of the cow that you don't normally eat like salivary glands, lymph nodes, tripe, and cheek/tongue fat. Needless to say, it was delicious.

Today was mostly meetings for me. We rolled into the high bay at around noon, just in time for our weekly collaboration-wide conference call. Then, we had another conference call about gondola-specific issues, and then we had a meeting with the CSBF staff to work out some issues regarding the launch clearance of our payload to their launch vehicle and some other logistical stuff. We then switched the cryostat from its vacuum roughing pump to a turbomolecular pump so it would pump to a lower pressure.

On other fronts, Britt and Michele finished up the work on the flight computer crate and we should be ready to start scan tests tomorrow. Shaul instructed Joy and Daniel on positioning gondola housekeeping thermometers while Jerry worked on our flight batteries. I have no idea what Hannes, Ilan, or the McGilligans (Kevin and François) did today, but I'm sure it was important.

Milligan, Jeff, and I then took a little field trip out to the wind farm that we can see from the airport. Armed with Google maps and satellite imagery, we were determined to find our way along the dirt roads and get to the wind turbines. We found that Google maps is almost completely worthless for this sort of thing. Most likely their data is simply out-of-date, as many of the roads and intersections we were looking for simply didn't exist. Still, after about a half hour of taking turns that pointed us more-or-less in the direction of the wind farm, we got there.

Wow.

Wind turbines are awesome. First, they're enormous. They look big on the horizon, but they're even more imposing when you're standing at the base. Second, they produce a ridiculous amount of power. Turns out that the one turbine nearest the road had its door just...wide open. So, naturally, we went inside. We found a monitor that was displaying some GE turbine control software, and found that the keyboard tray was, not surprisingly given the state of the door, unlocked. So, naturally, I clicked around, and found a "General Data" menu item. Upon opening, I was rewarded with a display of some statistics about the turbine, like Power generated (1520 kW), coil voltage (~340V), current (1400A), etc. I decided not to play around with the control menus, figuring that it might actually be possible for me to break a multi-million-dollar wind turbine.

After we got back from our little field trip, Jeff and I leak-checked the cryostat. Because the pressure was still pretty high, we didn't have particularly good sensitivity, but we weren't able to find any leaks -- good news. We'll leak check again just tomorrow when the pressure is lower just to be sure.

To make this day even better, when we got home Jeff found cowboy hats in the closet in his room.

Pictures (mostly of wind turbines, because, let's face it, THEY ARE AWESOME):
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico040709#

Day 12, 4/6/09 -- the cryostat strikes back

2009-04-06T23:52:00.000-07:00

Well, it was too good to be true. Work on the cryostat had been progressing fairly steadily and without too many mishaps. Today we had planned on closing the cryostat and starting to pump on it in preparation for cooling it. In the morning, we envisioned at about 10AM that it would take a few hours to get everything closed and we'd take an early night. I started writing this post at nearly 1AM and we're still here.

The first issue that came up was relatively simple. We had issues getting the instrument in properly due to some concentric baffling that has to nest together, but any angle between them screws the whole process up. Somehow, when we did this last time, it all just worked on the first try. This time, we had many fits and starts as the angles weren't quite right, so we had to tweak the angle with our Science Brick (a.k.a. a 26-lb tape-wrapped lead brick) and try multiple times.

Eventually we got it in...and we realized we had forgotten to plug in one of the housekeeping connectors, which required removing the instrument from the cryostat and plugging it in. After fixing that, Ilan checked wires and found that some of our fridge heater wires had opened up, meaning we wouldn't be able to cool our optics to 1K -- an unacceptable situation. So we spent the next 2 hours fixing wires.

Once we fixed all of the wiring issues, all that was left was to put the various shell lids on, seal the last o-ring lid, and pump, so we blasted some heavy metal in the high bay and got to work.

It's now 2:30 AM and we just started the vacuum pump. We pump through a restriction at first so as not to damage the delicate thermal filters via differential pressure, but eventually we will remove the restriction and let the cryostat pump directly into the pump so it will pump faster.

All in all, the problems we faced today weren't actually any worse than ones we've faced before -- it's just that much more frustrating when the end is in sight.

I'm not putting any pictures up in the post because I'm feeling a little lazy. You'll just have to click through to the pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico040609#

Day 11, 4/5/09 -- shackle, shackle, shackle

2009-04-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

Say it really fast -- it's fun, isn't it?

Weather today: Clear, chilly, and a bit windy. New Mexico is significantly colder than I thought it would be, in general.

After yesterday's debacle with the half-wave plate (HWP) anti-reflection coating (ARC), we tried to see if there was some way we could salvage the ARC on the side that had only begun to come up a little at the edge. We took some of the separated ARC and tried to tape it with various types of tape down to a disk of fused silica, but neither of them held when cooled to 77K. We made the decision to completely remove the ARC from the HWP, and after removing the residue left from the ARC, Jeff got the HWP mounted in the cryostat.

We also basically have completed the ≤ 1K portion of the instrument. Ilan has to run a few more tests on our thermometry, and we can then put it into the cryostat, close it up, and start pumping. Hopefully this will all happen fairly early tomorrow and we can have a nice, relaxed evening.

Michele and Britt got the flight computer crate up and running (yay!) and are working out whatever kinks they introduced by pulling it apart completely, redoing all the wiring, and putting it back together. Joy and Daniel got the secondary hexapod mounted on the gondola and made measurements of the primary hexapod geometry. Jerry, Joy, and Daniel started painting the gondola with emissive white paint -- and I have to say it looks pretty good. Daniel enjoyed the crane ride in his safety harness too.

We had a meeting today to discuss the state and plans for the next few days. It seems that everything is moving along well -- no major disasters or showstoppers in the works, as far as we can tell. Also at one point in the afternoon, Kevin, Hannes, Ilan, and I took a break to shoot some hoops on the very deformed basketball hoop outside the high bay. I beat Hannes at Pig, Hannes and I beat Kevin and Ilan in 2-on-2, and then we switched it up and Hannes and Ilan beat me and Kevin.

What I'm most excited about is now having SolidWorks installed on my laptop. This computer is so much faster than any of the other computers that we have running SolidWorks that it literally makes me giddy. I was just giggling to myself and marveling at how fast the gondola baffle assembly would update when I spun it around on the screen. Did I mention that I love technology?

Pictures plus bonus video:
http://picasaweb.google.com/asad137/EBEXInNewMexico040509#