It is incredible how fast a day can fly by. Today was our first at PEARL – a day spent setting up, calibrating and checking instruments for all of us. By the end of the day, SAOZ was fully operational, the Bruker had made its first cell measurements and PARIS was out of its box and mostly functional. A platform was nearly completed for the UT-GBS instrument, and once that is complete, we expect that will also be functioning early tomorrow. Today also went well for the SPS/MAESTRO team who are ironing out their new sun-tracker code, and expect their instruments to be on the roof tomorrow too.
In other news, the EC LIDAR team reported two nights of fantastic measurements on Friday and Saturday, and one other OK night, and Richard has the Bomem DA8 fully functioning, aligned and happy. The tests he carried out with a globar to determine the effects of beam-sharing seemed to work well, with just a small (2-3%) drop in signal intensity and no effect on line shape. This is great news for the three FTIR instruments sharing a solar tracker, as it means PARIS will be able to run simultaneously with either the Bruker or the Bomem through-out the campaign.
The sun scraped the horizon around noon, and the colours in the sky were gorgeous. We’re all looking forward to another productive day tomorrow, and maybe our first solar measurements!
Bec