BLASTpol and Preliminary ACS

The beginnings of an attitude control system have been integrated with BLASTpol. I’ve been working with Natalie on getting gyroscope readout working and Laura has been working in parallel with the help of Pedro to enable us to command the motors.

Mostly, I took these because Giles requested photos of the gondola, and I didn’t […]

Barth Making Cables (!)

A few weeks ago, Barth was actually making cables (for me!). I took a few pictures as proof that it actually happened. Only one turned out well, so I’ve also included a great picture Juan took of Natalie’s solar head bobbing thing.

The 50cm jumper/adapter cable Barth made contains about $200 of parts. I still […]

DAS Pictures

So there were a pile of pictures of the DAS (Data Acquisition System) and BLASTbus electronics on my personal camera that I’ve finally gotten around to uploading. There are a lot more than these few I’ve posted, but others probably don’t find them as interesting as I do. I’m biased because I’ve been working on […]

Computer, Magneto-Spear, Solar Cells

So I haven’t written a post for a while, but that’s only because nothing particularly interesting has happened for a while. (That and because there’s some old pictures sitting unloved and unuploaded on my other camera at home.) But interesting stuff is starting to happen again, and this is the beginnings of it.

First we […]

BLAST Pivot Assembly

The BLAST pivot completed assembly this morning. It never gets disassembled, so this is the only chance to see it (well, except that there’s a second pivot to build for Spider, but let’s ignore that). Barth, Laura, Juan, and a machinist (Frank?) did the assembly. Pictures courtesy of Juan.

The process is actually quite tricky […]

BLAST Inner Frame and Platform

In lieu of pictures from putting the inner frame on, here are pictures of it in its put-on state. This also shows the liquid balance system which can be used to dynamically balance the inner frame.

Last of all there are pictures of a hex cell platform to mount electronics to. It’s not super interesting […]

Reaction wheel attached

Since BLAST arrived yesterday (where yesterday is last wednesday), it’s time to assemble it. This is the reaction wheel mounting process. Mounting the inner frame is far more interesting, but there are no pictures of that. Maybe next time.

BLAST arrives!

Or, rather, it arrived…last week. But today I got the pictures that Juan took (thanks Juan). I learned that big aluminum gondolas are hard to remove from trucks. The pictures tell a better story than I can.