Last week a stray dog was found wandering CSBF. Since then Anne and Johanna have been taking care of her, and she seems a lot happier. By popular demand, I present a post entirely of dog. She doesn’t have an agreed upon name. She responds “equally well” to Dog, Doug, Tortilla, Crazy Eyes, Spider Dog, Blondie/The Dog With No Name. […]
|
||||
|
|
||||
The last couple days have been a little quiet, with Theo slowly pumping out (and a couple purges with dry nitrogen). People have been doing odd jobs, we’ve had some good food, and an important flag arrived. […]
After the big Theo closing (for those that don’t know, our cryostat is named Theodosia), and a day off, it was a good time to clean and reconfigure the lab. Afterwards was a good time to take a panorama of what’s happening in here. Theo got one further addition: the telescope baffles. And they all fit. […]
When the campaign started, June 15 was set as the target for having the cryostat closed and the vacuum pump turned on. Somehow, by 11pm this dream was realized. Before that, Bill played whack-a-grad-student. And the suspension cables were made shiny. (Yesterday was a day off, during which I took no photos.) […]
Team Toronto (plus Don) spent yesterday conducting a Bemco (thermal/vacuum) test. This mainly involves waiting around while temperatures or pressures change very slowly. As such, I took occasional sanity breaks and visited everybody else. The cryo team had finished with the telescope inserts and was closing up the cryostat. This mainly involved installing the vapour cooled shields (VCS). These are shells within the cryostat cooled by helium boil-off and insulated with many layers of aluminized mylar (aka MLI: multi-layer insulation). […]
Yesterday we started losing people, after reaching our peak population. With all the half-wave plates installed, Sean and John departed. Insert assembly also started wrapping up. And some of us set some equipment up in the Bemco chamer, for thermal/vacuum testing (round 2). Everything that flies must be tested to ensure it will survive. […]
Yesterday was another busy one for the telescope insert assembly team. For the first time, five inserts were placed in the gondola! (Then most were removed as changes and rearrangements were necessary.) Team gondola assembled the sun shields while waiting for the thermal/vacuum test chamber to become available. Also lots of miscellaneous cable and cyro work that I missed while doing other things. […]
For my first full day in Palestine, I made a point of trying to photograph everybody at work. We’ve got a big group here for the next week or so. Actually, there are roughly three groups: those assembling telescope inserts, those assembling half-wave plates and their rotators, and those doing gondola or general jobs. There are, of course, ambiguously classifiable people. The first wave got here a week before, so I arrived to an unpacked (and already messy) lab, an assembled gondola, and telescope work well underway. […]
Because Elio graciously took over Tristan’s shift early, a bunch of us night-shifters when on a midnight trip to Castle Rock. And Elio got to be alone for his shift. Again, this involved a climb up the rock, and a sled down the glacier on galley trays. Good times. Also a couple photos from Ob Hill the previous evening. Finally some news: BLAST ran out of cryogens two nights ago, and was finally shut off the following day. Now it’s drifting around the continent until it gets back into range to terminate the balloon and recover. Elio will be recovering, and the rest of us are leaving soon. Thanks Elio. […]
While we’re back in town for flight monitoring, there’s more time for seeing the sights. One sight open over the new year’s break was RF Scott’s hisotrical hut, just outside of town. So, I went inside and explored that. Otherwise, we’ve also been to Hut Point a few times as it’s a prime location for wildlife spotting. I managed to encounter a penguin one day, and an especially active seal another. […]