Starting about a month ago, the gondola was almost completely disassembled. Parts needed final modifications to match the flight-like configuration. After the reassembly, The gondola was also given a new, temporary, and spectacular inner frame. […]
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I spent a morning looking at the office windows, and the different things their sills have accumulated. […] A long overdue update on the Spider gondola. It has a new computer box, the new Pinhole Sun Sensor (PSS) array, chicken wire to protect from the reaction wheel, the rotating star cameras mounted, and a cart with really big casters. And more importantly, it scans! […] On my Saturday in Princeton, I went into work with the expectation of a quiet day, wrapping up some loose ends. Little did I know that in Sasha’s trunk lurked a nascent (boxed) form of inflatable air shark. While fridges were cycling, we saw it changed into its true form: full-blown terror of the, um, hallways. (Not for outdoor use.) […] I spent the week before last in Princeton working on installing the housekeeping system for the flight cryostat. Once things started working, I took a photography break and explored the highbay a little. […] These are some pictures taken while in Cambridge in July for a Spider simulations meeting. I’m playing with using flickr for photos on the site, and had already posted these. Thus, they make for a good test post. Test post! […] Juan loves gluing carbon fiber tubes so much, that he makes sure he gets to keep on doing it. Yesterday he, Jamil, and Steve (our last remaining, though soon-to-depart, summer undergrad) started gluing what will eventually become Spider’s sun shields. This time they’re doing one end of the first series of tubes. The other end […] A large bit of orangeness floatied its way around the highbay today. Taking the form of a blimp leftover from Boomerang, Mathew (a summer student) inflated it to test its lifting capacity. Such balloons are used to fly calibration sources so they can be 1km away and still 20° above the horizon. […] Last Friday I finally got all the parts for my new “Awesome Box” for housing a single BLASTBus2 motherboard. I think it’s pretty cute with its mini-backplane, and it’s all crammed into a box that couldn’t be much smaller. So I got out my camera, and today I’m dusting off my blogging hat. Enjoy! […] |
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