{"id":6106,"date":"2012-12-28T21:29:05","date_gmt":"2012-12-29T01:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/galadriel.astro.utoronto.ca\/ballast\/?p=6106"},"modified":"2012-12-28T21:29:05","modified_gmt":"2012-12-29T01:29:05","slug":"get-blasted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/?p=6106","title":{"rendered":"Get BLAST!ed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had been working on a special Christmas image for Tristan, since he&#8217;d reminded me to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sjbenton\/8286466394\/\" title=\"DFTBA\">DFTBA<\/a>. However, the launch delayed things. I hope this will keep people satisfied a little longer while I sort through my huge mass of launch-day photos, while also trying to babysit BLAST at float.<\/p>\n<p>During our line-of-sight marathon, while we had lots of data early in the flight, we discovered that the telescope is working quite well&mdash;much better than in 2010. We also had a few early troubles: a failed star tracker (one of a redundant pair), and the discovery that high-bandwidth TDRSS downlink had been noisifying our detectors. Thus, we&#8217;ve switched to slower and flakier iridium data and embraced the zen of less information (to varying degreess, from person to person). And so, other than a few scare, things are going well. We can only hope that it continues.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/ballast\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/blast2.gif\" alt=\"\" title=\"BLAST!\" width=\"1000\" height=\"394\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-6109\" srcset=\"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/ballast\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/blast2.gif 1000w, http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/ballast\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/blast2-150x59.gif 150w, http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/ballast\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/blast2-250x98.gif 250w, http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/ballast\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/blast2-300x118.gif 300w, http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/ballast\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/blast2-400x157.gif 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had been working on a special Christmas image for Tristan, after he&#8217;d reminded me to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/sjbenton\/8286466394\/\" title=\"DFTBA\">DFTBA<\/a>. However, the launch delayed things. I hope this will keep people satisfied a little longer while I sort through my huge mass of launch-day photos, while also trying to babysit BLAST at float. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6106"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6106"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6111,"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6106\/revisions\/6111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/droppingballast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}