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.) […]
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The pivot needs to come down to have an inclinometer installed. On Spider, the pivot is especially high (the 28 foot ladder is barely long enough). Extra complication is supplied by the extra-heavy suspension cables. Natalie designates herself the climber while Barth, Juan, Jamil, and I help/watch/photograph/heckle/etc. […] On Friday we did some much needed lab cleaning in the highbay. Then, with undergrads (aka “minions”, in the nicest sense of the word) John and Little-/Young-/Undergrad-/Other-Steve around we decided to free up more space by assembling the sun shields and “storing” them on the gondola. A few hours and hundreds of bolts later, the carbon-fibery awesomeness of the gondola was successfully augmented. […] |
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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. […]
After putting the gondola together, we spent some time preparing for electrical integration with the cryostat. Mostly this took the form of a "solder party" in which we made cables for several days. There are some other random bits too. These photos sat on my computer for a little while before I got around to posting them. […]
With Hurricane Sandy over, the truck finally managed to arrive from Toronto with all the Spider gondola bits. After a day of work with the team here, we had a gondola again. […]
On Wednesday morning Spider was a fully functional balloon gondola. By Thursday night it was a collection of pieces packed into a couple crates, and a series of tubes. Jamil, Juan, Natalie, and I wroked furiously in between to effect the transition. By next week, these pieces will hopefully have found their way to Princeton, where they will be integrated with the flight cryostat and detector systems (which will replace the shipping container being used as inner frame). […]