A few days ago, Don randomly showed up on his way to pole. Naturally, he visited us in the BLAST Ops room. Since he was there during one of those rare times when all six drivers were in the room, we had him take a mosaic panorama of us working. It was a pain to […]
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At 9:31 local time (NZDT) BLAST-Pol terminated. It now rests about 630km away, roughly along the South Pole Traverse. The gondola is at rest, we think it might be upright-ish, and systems still work good enough for us to guess that it might be upright-ish. So, at least for now, things are in good shape. […] Yesterday was a momentous day in our flight. We switched from our targets far from the sun—mostly what we call the “axehead” in Vela—and moved a region in Lupus very near the sun. To celebrate, Tristan danced to the region’s theme song: Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. (Yes, all of our targets have theme […] Since launch I have not taken a lot of photos. This is partly because there’s less to take photos of, and partly because I’m too constantly busy for new photos. The upside of this is that it’s easy for me to catch up to the present (almost) in a single post. This starts the first […] Before launch day, I had collected some more Christmas-related pictures that I was planning to post. But, they were preempted. Now they have been “deempted” and I don’t have many recent pictures to post instead. This includes two Christmas-related sets: The Christmas Eve party on the 24 (from Matt), Christmas dinner and MAAG on […] The final installment in my agonizingly prolonged series of posts about launch day. This picks up with the beginning of inflation, and ends when everyone goes inside to start doing real work. Or, at least everyone goes inside and agonizes over altitude data until we can start doing real work. The most disappointing part about […] The second phase of my launch pictures starts with rollout of all the equipment to the pad. Mark, Matt and Elio also head out because they need to physically interact with the gondola. Eventually they radio for me with the “urgent” job of taking some official pre-launch picutres. In my capacity of official photographer, I […] For the first phase of launch photos, I have preparation. This is from when we arrive in the morning (actually people like Matt start preparation before that by sending commands from their dorm rooms) to when we roll out for the launch pad. For people wanting to check on loved ones, this will be the […] Because I recently learned how to use a panorama stitching tool (you probably noticed), I felt like taking several panoramas on launch day—especially when it became clear that we would actually launch. But because I am now really busy and (at least for now) sleep deprived, and because the interestingness of photographs might drop off, […] At a little after 17:00 local time, BLAST-Pol launched! I have almost one thousand photos to sort through, and they will appear once I have a chance to do so. As a bonus, in the launch date pool I had predicted today at 16:00. I am thus the winner of a “fabulous prize”. |
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