After a busy day of making measurements and testing instruments half the team whittled away the latter part of Thursday evening watching a horror movie (not a particularly good one for that matter) that they found on the television back at the Eureka weather station.
The weather Friday morning started in the low -40s with some ice crystals, a slight wind making the temperature feel just below -50 degrees, and minimal cloud cover focused near the horizon. The clouds had mostly dispersed by mid-morning, and the rest of the weather stayed approximately constant, resulting in fairly nice conditions to take solar measurements (for which the sun was up for just under 7 and a half hours). Overall it was a productive end to our first week at Eureka as part of the intensive phase team.
At the Ridge Lab Paul began the day by syncing the PARIS laptop to the Ridge Lab time server. After this Paul attempted to setup PARIS to take solar measurements, but found that PARIS was not communicating with the laptop after the sync. With the help of Pierre the communication issue was eventually resolved by power cycling both the laptop and PARIS. After this Paul began taking solar measurements with PARIS, taking a total of 33 over the course of the day. Paul hopes to continue making solar measurements and start the process of backing up PARIS data to the CANDAC archives tomorrow.
With the Bruker-FTS, Erik started a N2O cell test remotely from the Eureka weather station before the team left in the morning so that the test could be complete by the time the sun fully rose. This was done in order to maximize the number of measurements made while the sun was up. The cell test finished just before active tracking with the solar tracker was achieved. After removing the N2O cell from the instrument, solar mid-infrared measurements began and were run continuously throughout the day and 66 measurements were taken in total. After measurements ended, Sébastien prepared the instrument for a HCl cell test to be run remotely from the weather station.
Kristof spent a part of the day troubleshooting the PEARL-GBS suntracker. The motor controllers appear to be working well, and Kristof was unable to reproduce the problems he had been having with them. He eventually found and fixed a possible source of these errors, and will be monitoring the suntracker in the coming days to see if the problems reappear. In the afternoon, Kristof and Pierre took down the suntracker dome to defrost it indoors. An accident damaged the dome and made it so that they were unable to reinstall the dome today. PEARL-GBS remains offline until the dome is replaced tomorrow. While the dome was off Kristof levelled and aligned the suntracker to ensure accurate pointing.
At 0PAL CRL made 23.5 hours of UV measurements on March 2nd. The pump chamber was reinstalled in Laser 1 this morning, and the patch over the hole looks promising. Leak tests during the day were successful as of 7 PM tonight. The leak test and UV measurements will continue overnight.
Gurpreet tested the SPS and suntracker performance and found that they were working together as expected. For most of the time that the sun was visible he had the SPS instrument making solar measurements. Gurpreet has so far been unsuccessful in pinpointing the issues MAESTRO has been having and will continue to work on this tomorrow.
Ghazal and Alexey had a good night of measurement on March 2nd. At the end of their measurements the laser power diminished and so today they went up again and repeated the procedure of cleaning the optics and adding the mixture. This failed to solve the issue, but refilling the gas chamber of the laser managed to bring the system back up to fully operational status.