Monday night was fairly uneventful for the campaign team, though 6 members of them the team went for a brief walk to appreciate the surreal stillness of the nearby area and to try to take a few pictures of the clear night sky. Paul encountered an unexpected problem with wearing glasses as they soon were completely iced over due to the outside temperatures hovering around -40 degrees.
On Tuesday morning, which was a cold -42 degrees (with a wind chill making it feel like -53 degrees), the team minus Emily and Ghazal, set off for the PEARL Ridge Lab. They were hoping to take advantage of the sun being slated to be up for 6 hours and 15 minutes. Luckily the clouds and haze of the past few days were less prevalent and a number of solar measurements were made across the various instruments. By evening the temperature hovered around -46 degrees, which according to the Eureka station manager made it the coldest day of 2017 so far at Eureka.
Paul spent the morning in a similar fashion to yesterday, making half a dozen N2O cell tests measurements and half a dozen test measurements without any cells with PARIS-IR. Then once the sun was visible enough for active tracking with the suntracker he switched to solar measurements, making 21 of these before clouds came in that obscured the sun.
At 0PAL over the past day CRL made 15 hours of regular measurements with the UV channels. An additional two hours were spent doing sky alignment tests. In the lab, Emily installed a pump chamber into Laser 1 and began the leak test, which was successful. Conditions indicate that Green laser measurements will likely begin tomorrow. Peter and Emily carried out another adjustment on the hatch limit switch. Although not quite perfect, they decided that at -44C, it was best not to stress the hatch motor with more tests. UV measurements were begun again in the afternoon.
In the morning Kristof redid some of the lab tests on the PEARL-GBS. Once finished, he finalized the instrument setup and connected and configured the air conditioner that will provide temperature regulation for the spectrometer. Since the suntracker dome on the roof was heavily frosted nearing the end of the day, the start of measurements was pushed to tomorrow.
In the IR lab, Sébastien did a HCl cell test in the morning, while the sun was still below the horizon. The suntracker was able to lock on the sun early in the afternoon and Erik started solar measurements. 20 mid-infrared spectra were taken before clouds moved in for the rest of day.
Gurpreet discovered that the shaft of the tracker in the elevation direction had become displaced during shipping and was interfering with other parts. Gurpreet and Pierre managed to bring the shaft back into its correct position and replace the parts that had been damaged. Testing indicated that the tracker now performs as intended. He hopes to test the repaired tracker with the SPS instrument tomorrow, and time permitting work on MAESTRO as well.
On the night of February 27, Alexey and Ghazal operated the DIAL from 21:00 to 6:00. It was a clear night and Ghazal reported that the signals looked stable and strong.