Day 20 (Sunday March 11)  Hurting but alive...

More bad news, folks.  We broke almost all the detectors in the cooling accident.  Two of them looked ok on data readout, two looked completely broken, and the other three were somewhere in the middle, with parts working and parts not.  The situation's pretty dire because we didn't think we brought any *good* working spares!  We did bring five extras, but they never worked particularly well in the lab -- that's why they didn't make it into the final buildup.  You better believe there were some long faces around the lab today...one of the worst FOXSI days ever!

But it's not all bad news.  After many attempts to figure out a way to revive the broken detectors we ended up putting in our spare detectors...and found out they work better than we thought!  Two of the original detectors survived the cooling catastrophe, and of the five extras we put in two are working pretty well and we might be able to revive one or two more.  So that gives us at least 4 out of 7 working detectors, with the possibility of more.  Getting these detectors ready will be a ton of work.  They have to undergo a full testing and calibration process...something that took us several weeks at the lab, but here we will need to do it in a few days!  We also have to prepare these detectors for flight by staking down parts and gluing temperature sensors on them.  And add onto that the time we lost (at least a day) in troubleshooting this problem...the race is on!!  It's gonna be a lot of full days and late nights but I am confident we can do it.  FOXSI lives!!