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

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...

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#