Not much of note was done on Tuesday evening. Some of the team went for another night walk, others exercised in the small gym at the station, worked on writing up papers, or did laundry. Overall it was an evening for mundane tasks that even while in the Arctic still need to be done.
On Wednesday morning the temperature was in the low -40's with a wind chill feeling like -59 degrees. Cloud cover dominated the morning sky as the team left for the PEARL Ridge Lab, causing the some worry that no solar measurements would be made today, despite the sun being up for just over 6 and a half hours. Luckily for the team close to noon the cloud cover dissipated, allowing for solar measurements to be made by various instruments for the next few hours.
Paul spent the morning, when it was cloudy, taking more HBr cell measurements followed by test measurements using no gas cells. In total half a dozen of each type of measurements were made. Following the emergence of the sun from the cloud cover Paul attempted to make solar measurements before encountering an issue with the PARIS-IR detectors becoming easily saturated. After several attempts to fix the issue, an email from Kaley pointed out the likely culprit of the issue, the preamp settings, and the issue was fixed with the flip of a switch. Paul spent the rest of the afternoon making solar measurements, taking 20 of these in total.
Last night Ghazal and Alexey ran the DIAL for several hours. However the night was partially cloudy and due to this the measured signal intensity was damped for a portion of that time.
Cloudy conditions in the morning allowed Erik to perform a second N2O cell test with the Bruker in order to check the consistency of the cell test results after swapping the beamsplitter. The cell test finished just as the skies began to clear and mid-infrared measurements were soon started. A total of 58 measurements were recorded before the signal became to weak as a result of the setting Sun. Sébastien spent the majority of the day checking and documenting the results of all HCl cell tests previously measured. Erik and Sébastien plan to continue to perform instrument tests, and if clear skies persist they hope to continue mid-infrared measurements tomorrow.
Yesterday (the 28th of February) CRL took UV measurements for 16 hours, but the alignment was not optimal leading to low signal intensity. Overnight Emily managed to improve the alignment during a period of ice fog and clouds, and this improvement resulted in boosting signals by a factor of 100. On a less positive note; the patch on Laser 1's coolant system failed this morning, so instead of making measurements with the green laser, Emily instead tried again to get it watertight. Peter (CANDAC operator) and Jay (Eureka weather station staff) aided her and a new patch was installed this evening. She hopes to see by tomorrow if this new patch manages to suffice.
The PEARL-GBS started taking measurements today. Over the next few days only zenith-sky measurements will be taken since the sun is too low in the sky for the GBS's to do anything else. With the PEARL-GBS now working, Kristof has spent the rest of the day tidying up the lab and troubleshooting internet connectivity issues with the instrument laptops.
Gurpreet performed dispersion tests for the SPS instrument with different wavelength sources and found that the results were promising. After verifying that the tracker and SPS now work together as expected Gurpreet spent his time troubleshooting communication issues with MAESTRO, and found where they originate in the communications line. He plans on fixing this issue tomorrow, along with performing a complete systems test. Afterwards Gurpreet will begin assembling the components on the roof of the Ridge Lab.