On the 13th I took a visit to the Dark Sector Lab (DSL). (The “Dark Sector” is the name for the whole zone across the skiway, where the telescopes live. Dark, here, is used in the radio sense: things like walkie talkies and wireless ethernet aren’t allowed.) DSL houses Keck’s single-receiver predecessor BICEP2, and the very large South Pole Telescope (SPT).
In the lab, the K1 insert was being placed into the cryostat, to close it up.
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- Floor hatch! Phil lowers out an old unused rack
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- Vibration-isolating heat strap
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- Tipped, can see lens. Opaque white to you, transparent to CMB
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- Telescope forebaffle being lifted…
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- …through another secret hatch! This time to the roof
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- Big orange flag marking an IceCube string (a ~2km deep hole containing 60 neutrino detectors). In my panorama of the area you can see a lot of these. IceCube is big!
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- DSL. BICEP2 ground screen at top right, SPT at left (all of left, not just top)
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- The main building, a little closer now
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- SPT again. Here it’s looking away, but I didn’t want to go all the way around
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- The heart of BICEP2, a rack of various computers and electronics
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- The mount, complete with big red emergency kill switch
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- The mount and (the bottom of) the telescope
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- The mount’s other side. With logos
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- Taking noise data. Tread lightly!!!
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- The back side. Well, the current back…it rotates
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- The readout electronics. The grounding here is what we came to inspect
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- Random stuff in little drawer racks
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- Helium dewar. BICEP2 drinks helium (unlike Keck which uses the purely electronic pulse tube coolers)
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- The BLASTbus (previous generation) crate
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- James Brown Art. Since the head chef was named James Brown, this might not have been made by the Godfather of Soul
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- The clean room in DSL
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- A lot of gas cylinders. This must be their nest
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- Defunct ground shield, on the other side of MAPO
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- The UFO door to get inside
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- Inside. Snow, and a slippy slide to the I-beam landing
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- Inside, from the other side. Featuring door
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- Mast
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- Ladder from nowhere. Like other buildings here, MAPO used to be elevated, but isn’t any more
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- Back inside MAPO the K1 insert goes into the cryostat
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- Clouds, as seen by Keck. Extra-drifty noise
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- Rotator now complete with half-wave plate
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- Ring of Fire
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- Sporting his new Super Mario moustache, Chris lies underneath the cryostat for some plumbing
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- The waveplate installed. It shimmers slightly from this angle
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- Video monitor, to spy on people climbing into the telescope mount
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- Rerolling tangled tape
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- Lid, with more superinsulation
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- Almost-empty MCE crate. Using a single card designed for connection/wiring tests
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- The still-open bottom side, flipped upright
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- Cables. All of the signals come out the bottom of the cryostat
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- LC-130 taxiing
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- And then disappears into a cloud of snow, as it takes off
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- A lot of snow moving happens at the south pole. Building piles, moving piles, removing piles
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