Sunday evening was spent watching the Oscars by half the team and some of the station staff, with a friendly competition to guess the winners in the various categories. This contest was ultimately won by one of the CANDAC operators, Peter, who managed to correctly guess 16 of the 24 winners.
On Monday morning the team (minus Emily) left the Eureka Weather Station to head over to the PEARL Ridge Lab with hopes of making the first solar measurements of the Intensive Phase of the campaign. The team was in good spirits despite the prevailing cloudiness of the morning, and the weather being somewhat warmer than it had been in the previous days (up into the low -30's) certainly helped take some of the bite out of time spent outside. Part of the team had hopes to use the nearly 6 hours of daylight today in order to make solar measurements.
At 0PAL, 2 hours and 40 minutes of UV measurements were made with the CRL during the previous night (the 26th), and after some late night alignment, these measurements continued overnight into this morning. Today, Emily patched the hole in Laser 1, and she plans to leak-test the repair tomorrow. While watching epoxy dry, she took care of some other tasks around the lab, adjusting the webcams and systems for remote operations, and testing the hatch limit switch.
Up at the Ridge Lab, Gurpreet tried to test the MAESTRO instrument inside the lab and will probably be continuing this tomorrow. He realized that due to some mechanical faults the tracker had stopped working and is currently working on bringing this component back to an operational state.
Kristof spent the morning performing the resolution, polarization and straylight tests for the PEARL-GBS, and left the instrument running for dark current measurements overnight. He also installed a shutter in the UT-GBS, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio for the campaign intensive phase. In the afternoon, Pierre and Kristof braved the cold on the roof and replaced the faulty motor controllers for the PEARL-GBS suntracker. He hopes to begin making measurements with this instrument tomorrow.
Alexey and Ghazal went to the Ridge Lab to take measurements during the previous night (the 26th). They started their measurements at 21:00 and due to cloudy conditions they stopped measurements at 3:15.
No solar measurements were taken with the Bruker 125HR spectrometer as the suntracker could only track in passive mode while the Sun was partially covered by clouds. In the morning, Erik and Sˇbastien took another set of measurements of the laser amplitudes across various optical path differences. After this, Erik ran a N2O cell test, followed by an HBr cell test in the afternoon.
Today Paul spent the early morning taking half a dozen each of HBr cell and no cell measurements with PARIS-IR. As the Sun rose into a visible position the suntracker was turned on and the beam of light was aligned into the PARIS instrument. While the suntracker was in passive mode due to light haze in the morning, Paul attempted to make solar measurements to take advantage of the first day without serious cloud coverage. As the hazy conditions worsened the solar measurements eventually were stopped and some of the latter measurements may be of too poor quality to be of use. Overall 25 solar measurements were made.