A post of updated BLASTpol photos.
Since the last update not much has changed. The OSC is mounted in a temporary manner with no PV. There are about 4000lbs of sand bags strapped in the SIP mount. There are a few more cables than before.
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Yesterday we test-assembled Spider. Spider, in all its carbon-fiber-and-finely-crafted-joints glory, is the most beautiful gondola ever created—in my humble opinion. Sadly, finely-crafted has its limits and there are a few misfit pieces. We were joined by Emma, Jamil, and Steffi: our new student, returning student, and guest photographer (visiting Juan). Last week the last of three Spider starcam baffles was glued. Natalie and Juan have become the de-facto gluing people, so they continued doing their thing. This was an easy job, but I felt like having pictures. New star camera computers arrived last week. We can’t seem to buy the EBX boards we are using as flight computers, so instead we are using cute little PC-104+ guys. I have named this one mite, after spider mites (those little red spiders). Also, Natalie got her corrected star camera baffle discs. The Spider gondola is composed of 35 CFRP tubes. Gluing of all the tubes required 5 days. All I can say -and I think Natalie shares my opinion- it is a tricky and long process. Here are some more pictures of the gluing, particularly of the trickier inserts, such as the spreader bar and the […] We stared the gluing process with the less demanding joints: the scoop and the tubes that will be under compression. As we got better we moved into the more demanding tubes. We used a jig to fix the clocking of the inserts, we cured the tubes vertically in the jig for 24 hours and then […] We prepared a new non-grooved test tube as the fishing lines spacer approach behaved poorly in the pull test. And the results were excellent: the tubes where pulled up to 45700 lbf before the glue joint failed. Here are some pictures of the gluing procedure. Enzo wanted pictures of Mark Halpern’s BLAST pivot tester. So, here they are. It has turnbuckles for grabbing the pivot tabs (on the stator) and holding tension. Currently nothing grabs the rotor, but Pedro is working on that. The day after the joints arrived we got a big box full of carbon fiber tubes. We waited for Juan to get back from vacation so that he could open them. My self restraint wasn’t strong enough to wait to open the joints. They’re all cut to length and weigh almost nothing. If only we […] Where by “Machine Shop Update” I mean what would have been an update last week if I hadn’t just now discovered that I have these pictures (all from Juan). But the now-not-up-to-date progress shows nearly complete reaction wheel parts and SIP cage. |
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