| Marie cleans the flywheel. |
| Gaelen uses one of the scopes to check the alignment of the flywheel. |
| Matt makes a new magnetometer cable. (These next few pictures are the ones I took while writing Wednesday's journal entry.) |
| Marco and Marie tissue-papering the new mirror cover. |
| Gaelen takes a picture of Marco after installing the mirror cover. |
| The new mirror cover in place. I'm standing where Gaelen was in the last picture. |
| A bird's eye view of Enzo securing the ACS to the gondola. |
| Marco in flight code corner. I'm usually sitting (for instance, as I write this) at Galadriel, which is the black monitor on the right next to the printer. |
| Ed and David take a break from schedule file work in their second floor office. To the left you can see Barth hard at work on some proposal or another. |
| Gaelen puts a piece of tape around a thermometer to keep it from falling off while the Stycast epoxy cures. |
| Sometimes you can get liquid helium dewars that are chilled on the outside, too. This one's been sitting outside in the snow for a few days. |
| Hotel Dilbert. |
| Hotel Dilbert. This is roughly how dark it is around eleven at night. |
| The FTS (Fourier Transform Spectrometer) in its crate. |
| Mark, Enzo and the LDB guys heave the FTS out of its crate. |
| Two SIP computers on the bench for repairs. |
| Looking up at the mirror cover on the mirror. The big black tube is the secondary support structure. |
| Marie checks to see if the FTS works while Mark and Jeff supervise. |
| Looking across the pad towards where Radar Hill would be if we could see it. |
| A frosty hose clamp holds the transfer tube in the helium transfer line. |
| A frosty hose clamp holds the transfer tube in the helium transfer line. |
| We can't even make out the trees on the other side of the pad now due to fog and snow. |
| A view of our frosty work environment. Note the helium dewars being stored in the snow. |
| Gaelen removes even more tape from another of the sun shield panels. |
| Gaelen and Marco unfold one of the thermal blankets to cover a panel. Someone's really good at folding those blankets. |
| Gaelen plays hackysack with a roll of duct tape. |
| Gaelen plays hackysack with a roll of duct tape. |
| Gaelen plays hackysack with a roll of duct tape. |
| Marco juggles. |
| Marco juggles. |
| Gaelen juggling. |
| Gaelen juggling. |
| Gaelen and Marco attach some reinforcement to one of the solar shield panels. |
| Marco, Ed and I reflect on the fake sun. |
| Marco, Ed and I reflect on the fake sun. |
| Matt inspects the finished sun shields. |
| No change in the weather. |
| The balloon base in the snow. |
| A special non-alcoholic beverage? |
| Matt tries to see if non-alcoholic beverages work well with rum. |
| Macro discovers the empty bottle. |
| US, Canadian, Mexican and Italian flags flying at Esrange for the BLAST collaboration. |
| A view of the road down to the main gate. |
| The sun shields back down for more adjustments to the hardware at the top of it. |
| It's looking a bit better than yesterday: at least we can see the trees. |
| Looking east. |
| Measuring snow accumulation on the pad. |
| 175 mm. |
| The balloon base. |
| The satellite station across the pad from the balloon base. |
| The satellite station across the pad from the balloon base. |
| A 360 degree panorama of the pad. You may want to compare this to the panorama I took of the Palestine pad. |
| Putting the sun shields on. |
| Marie bolts on one of video transmitters. I'm merely providing a temporary clamp. |
| Gaelen puts a sun shield bold on. |
| Ed in his office, working on flight scheduling, a smelly business. |
| BLAST with sun shields attached. |
| Matt looks up from cryostat corner. The disassembled FTS can be seen at lower right. |
| Barth pops into Marks office to discuss something. |
| Enzo pumps the pressure vessel full of helium so he can leak check it. |
| Marie leak checks the O Ring seal on the pressure vessel. |
| Gaelen routes thermometry. |