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

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#