| After the rain Friday morning. |
| Rain clouds in the east over the rocket base. |
| Rain clouds in the east over the rocket base. |
| The PV out of the pressure vessel to stycast a leaking weld. There's a white-taped brick on the left side of the front plate to keep it from tipping over. |
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| (14591x1806, 25144 kb) A 360 degree panorama of the pad from Friday night, after a long rain. The cut in the photograph is roughly to the east. Left of centre, Radar Hill is still obscured by rain clouds. There are a few stitching artifacts in the foreground, mostly on Hercules, but on the whole it turned out well enough. | |
| The PV in the drying rack. |
| Looking down on the secondary and one of the star camera baffles from up at the pivot. |
| A blob of weld-fixing stycast. |
| The PVBOB open for the last time to leak check the PV. |
| Running scan test overnight. It's really quite dull. |
| The roll damping flywheel in action. In the top right, you can see the reaction wheel turning as well. |
| Pull testing a new tractor by using one of the helium tankers as dead weight. The old tractor turned out to be inadequate for the task of hauling the spool around the highbay. |
| Hooked to the front of the tanker. |
| The new tractor. |
| Pulling BLAST outside at 10 Saturday morning. |
| Getting ready for pickup. |
| Pickup. |
| Pickup. |
| Pickup. |
| Pickup. |
| Marie checks out one of the bird feeders on the SIP solar array. (Actually it's a load dump for the SIP's charge controllers.) |
| Derek at the controls of Hercules. |
| Bringing the ballast hoppers into place. |
| Attaching the ballast hoppers. |
| Attaching the SIP solar array. The ballast hoppers had to be removed since the gondola couldn't be lifted high enough. |
| Trying to fit the solar arrays. It didn't quite fit so a modification or two had to be made. |
| Trying to fit the solar arrays. |
| Mark tries to make the SIP solar array more rigid using Kevlar string. |
| Attaching the ballast hoppers once again. |
| Attaching the ballast hoppers once again. |
| Gaelen, Matt and Marie watch the proceedings. |
| BLAST full assembled (at last). Don is on the ground testing the line-of-site transmitters. |
| BLAST heads out to the pad. |
| Doing transmission tests on the pad. |
| Doing transmission tests on the pad. |
| An empty high bay. |
| Still out there. |
| Coming back in after the hang-test. |