Two days ago we were investigating what had caused alignment problems during our last attempt at making beam maps. This investigation lead to the discovery that our secondary mirror is offset about 3mm below where it should be. That may not sound like a lot, but it really makes a difference to our sensitive optical system. The secondary had to be removed to fix it.
The CSBF folks also conducted a mid-air cable repair operation. This was carried out by Tom, who has the best name tag on base (especially because I think it’s real): “Thomas Thomas II”.
The weather continued to remind us where we are, and who’s boss. Condition 3 encompasses a pretty wide range of conditions, from beautiful to very much not beautiful. In this instance it wass very much not beautiful, but still kind of cool in the as-long-as-I-don’t-have-to-stay-out-more-than-a-minute sense. Some of us wanted to stay a few hours to finish things, but were warned we may not be able to get back to town if we did. More on the continuing weather saga to come.
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- Tom on the lift. The lift doesn’t get used often enough
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- Luke, Alec, Joseph, and Vic look on
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- And Gabe too
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- Midair soldering, a delicate operation
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- A closeup of Tom
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- Joseph installs the complete sphere around the HGA
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- Luke watching
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- Luke sees something. Where would we be without him?
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- Mark, Elio, and Jeff work on carefully measuring alignment of the mirrors and cryostat window
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- Elio measures my alignment
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- Laser dot on very precise ruler
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- Mark, tweaking things
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- Laura, doing work completely unrelated to the mirror
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- Laura’s space, with three computer screens
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- Tristan
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- A filmmaker comes to interview Mark
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- The crew continues to film as he and Elio remove the secondary
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- Whoever installed the orange safety fence screwed up the speaker arrangement that Matt and I had concocted for most even distribution of sound. Matt fixes it
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- Bolt modification
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