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A break in the action
Today, we entered somewhat into a
"thumb-twiddling" stage of the campaign. ANITA is not quite ready
to button up and be put back into the gondola and they're working in
close proximity to the TIGER instrument and the SIP. We can't
really do any whopper runs and so we're just letting the flight CPU run
and run, to make sure that it has no problems. So far, it has
been running without a glitch for over 4 days. So it seems like
our CPU problem may have fixed itself.
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It was a
good day to make some phone calls and get
my email inbox cleared. Since our connection down here is very
slow (about two or three times slower than a standard dial-up modem)
even checking text-based email is somewhat of a chore. So today,
I
organized some email and cleaned up around our workspace. Doesn't
really make for a very interesting journal entry!
Chris Field, one of the NSBF payload engineers,
started helping us look at the instrument's TDRSS data output.
Even though this test is not really very conclusive, it is good to make
sure that the information port that will eventually feed to a TDRSS
satellite works correctly. There is still more work to do on this
tomorrow.
Back in town tonight, at Gallagher's Pub,
the big event of the night was tango dancing lessons. A whole
bunch of people showed up. A scientist in town was teaching,
which I thought was interesting. While it looked like a pretty
good time, I opted it out for the sake of the female who might have had
to dance with me!
Tomorrow, Dr. Bob Binns and Paul Dowkontt are
scheduled to arrive. Bob Binns is our group's Principal
Investigator and is one of my advisors. Paul Dowkontt is our
electrical engineer who designed all the electronics in TIGER. It
will be good to have Bob around to help give a push in our progress,
and Paul will be indispensable during our final satellite telemetry
testing phase.
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