16 February 2011
Back to Eureka - Pre-Campaign
The pre-campaign phase of the 2011 ACE Validation Campaign has begun!
Emily, Zen, Liviu, Guillaume, as well as three astronomers - Eric, Max,
and Pierre - landed safely at Eureka around 8:30pm on Monday, Feb 7. We
haven't seen much sunlight since then - the sun is expected to rise later
on next week, but this hasn't stopped us from getting some great work done
so far.
While Pierre, Max, and Eric headed up to PEARL to set up their telescopes
and begin taking measurements, Emily, Liviu, Guillaume and Zen have been
at 0PAL working on their instruments. The week's seen a lot of progress,
as well as some fun sublimation baseball and scenic walks.
Liviu dismounted the star photometer telescope, replaced the mount with a
new model, re-configured the stand, re-mounted the telescope, and has
successfully calibrated the new mount. An investigation into the noise
interference has begun while the star photometer has started to take
measurements during clear-sky nights.
Zen and Guillaume have been busy performing repairs to the E-AERI. The MR,
Agilent multimeter, and a new cooling system have all been re-installed.
The front-end portion of the instrument was brought into the lab and
re-assembled for calibration and validation testing purposes. Upon
receiving confirmation from University of Wisconsin that validation tests
were successful, the instrument was re-assembled outside and as of today
is ready for measurements - unfortunately there is snow falling, so no
measurements yet! Some tests to the instrument still remain.
Zen