Since launch I have not taken a lot of photos. This is partly because there’s less to take photos of, and partly because I’m too constantly busy for new photos. The upside of this is that it’s easy for me to catch up to the present (almost) in a single post.
This starts the first frantic day after launch, while we had high-quality line-of-sight data. Everyone was a the highbay for about 36 hours doing all the early-flight tuning up we needed to do while we had the good data. Then I have a few pictures covering the first small shift (Tristan and I, and Matt for a little while), and then the next few days at our new space in the Crary lab in McMurdo proper.
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- BLAST, still visible, as it would be for the rest of the night
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- Nick takes a rest in the sun after a day of hard work
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- Pump and hose. No longer of much use
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- BLAST’s indoor power supply. Similarly unused
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- Lead bricks hose clamps, with nothing left to balance
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- Destruct Device Card. A souvenir Elio caught on the post-launch wind
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- For some ascending-and-waiting stress relief, Tristan boxes our “surface level piball”
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- The star camera video monitors show “blobs”/stars (the little bits with a boxes around them, not the overall fuzzy pattern)
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- Lorenzo approves of star cameras that actually work
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- The following afternoon. Most people have gone off to sleep, and light are off for the mezzanine nappers
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- Sources! Those downward spikes are a bright source, as seen by our detectors
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- After one more pictureless day at LDB, we move to our new space in Crary
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- This office actually has a window!
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- The window has an excellent view
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- Early version of our hand-drawn flight-tracking map. Especially scary is the zone were CREAM spontaneously terminated
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- To enter the galley office, behind the kitchen, Matt had to get a hat. We decided “The Conn” (the person currently in charge of commanding) should wear it
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- The reason Matt got the hat: MidRats cards, officially allowing us to eat at midnight rations
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- Conn! (Khaaaan!) (courtesy Matt)
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- Barth and Elio are the shift following Tristan and I (and before Matt and Laura)
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- Natalie’s new New Year digs. She has become our representative at the OCC in Texas
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- OCC: Operations Control Center
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- Official flight clocks
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- OCC pictures courtesy of Natalie
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- Guns and Drugs. The cheapest computers we could find, to act as our groundstations. They replace lambda, an ancient Pentium MX that didn’t have enough serial ports, and couldn’t handle USB-serial adapters
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- More recent update of our hand-tracked flight path. Also: the official version
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