This morning the early team showed up to hear in the weather briefing that there would be clouds all morning. Good thing the cryostat is ready for its day of many helium fills, or they might not have had things to do (or, actually, there’s still lots to do). Since the sun sensors require low sun elevation and it was cloudy all morning, we decided to try to go outside in the afternoon. Joseph had also booked some TDRSS time to test the HGA. This led to the unsettling situation where we, by rotating the gondola over rough ground, may have done some damage to the more-fragile-than-expected pointing mechanism of the antenna.
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- Nitrogen, get out of the helium tank. You have your own
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- After the first helium fill, the cryostat is all snowy
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- Elio inserts the thumper to check the level
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- Thumping
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- Nick climbs on the helium dewar during the next fill
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- Me, craning. I like crane operator pictures and these are the first of me. So, you get three
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- Lowering something (I’m pressing down)
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- Most of the time I was just holding the chains away from the gondola
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- Tiny Tim is back again
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- Matt ties the solar panels down better, for the breeze outside. He seems to enjoy knot tying
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- Tristan in action
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- Mandatory picture of going back outside
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- Matt closes one of the big doors
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- Max Power!
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- Tim and the lift switch places
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- Barth watches data with his walkie talkie
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- Orienting the sun sensors towards the sun
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- Ooops, can’t spin that way, we oriented backwards
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- Elio, cable wrangler
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- Elio watches as Tim backs up to flip the gondola around
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- Mandatory complete shot of BLAST and Tim
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- Ready to go now
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- PSS1, on its new boom, sees sunlight
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- The PSS1 boom, awaiting light-weighting, is clamped in place for now
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- The riggers wait in the shade while we do out tests
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- The big beefy TDRSS cables slightly obscure PSS2
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- The exact (exact!) location of CSBF
wonderful usage of terminology within the post, it really did help
when i was surfing around