Yesterday there was an explosion in the computer box. Well, not so much an explosion as a popping, smoking, and ceasing to work. And everyone knows, once the magic black smoke escapes from electronics, you can never put it all back in to make things work again. (This situation is why I didn’t make a […]
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Two days ago we were investigating what had caused alignment problems during our last attempt at making beam maps. This investigation lead to the discovery that our secondary mirror is offset about 3mm below where it should be. That may not sound like a lot, but it really makes a difference to our sensitive optical […] One week ago, Laura was kind enough of to sign me up for a trip out to the ice caves (and the trip has since closed, due to the sea ice becoming too melty for the rest of the season). Ludo had signed up Juan, and Annamarie and Stef had independently signed themselves up too. […] Yesterday we went back outside to try taking beam maps again. In the morning, I wanted to test code before everything got set up. Then when BLAST was outside after lunch, we encountered alignment problems between the telescope and alignment laser. Then the weather showed up about 9 hours earlier than had been predicted just […] Yesterday, after some aggressive treatment, our noise problems went into remission. Turns out the fix was some preamp board modifications we wanted to do from the beginning, but had decided didn’t work, so never completed. Isn’t that always the way. On a sadder note, yesterday was Juan’s last official day. Delays are not uncommon, but […] Yesterday continued the saga of woes over detector noise and other funny behaviour. The point has been reached at which interesting tests start to be tried, like hitting things with hammers, isolating the gondola from the crane, etc. That and more of the things we’ve found useful before: reducing the number of cards in use, […] Yesterday was a quiet day, because almost everybody needed a day to sleep thanksgiving off, take a Sunday tour of Cape Evans, or in some cases just work from town, for a change of scenery. Again, I was too busy coding (and being really sleepy) to take any pictures, so I figure I’ll give Thanksgiving […] Yesterday I spent the whole day dealing with some big new problems we’d encountered. I didn’t take any pictures at all. But, I was prepared for this eventuality and have a stash of older unposted photos to fill this gap. For now, I’ll go through some taken on a hike up Ob Hill with Laura, […] BLAST-Pol went outside yesterday, in an attempt to do focus and beam map tests. They didn’t work, which meant I was really busy all day (and I would have been pretty busy even if they did work). But, there were a few mandatory photography moments that I had to give in to. I’ve supplemented the […] Yesterday we mounted the as-finished-as-they’ll-get-until-flight-ready sun shields. This first involved moving the shields around the gondola, which is really tricky in a highbay where the crane only runs down the middle, and you can’t move things off to the side. But it worked. This makes the gondola start to look really complete. That isn’t to […] |
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