Day 3 (Thursday, Feb. 23)

Yesterday more of our team arrived and we got down to business!  First was to set up the long aluminum tube that holds our experiment and start putting in the "optics."  These are the parts of the telescope that reflect and focus X-rays.  Unlike visible light, X-rays are hard to reflect: they usually pass right through materials or else they get absorbed.  To reflect them you need to reflect at a very small angle off of an extremely smooth and precise surface.  Our telescope has seven optics and each of them has seven mirrors nested together within it.  Producing these mirrors and finding a way to line them up together in a secure way without distorting any of them took years and a lot of effort, and we have our NASA colleagues from Alabama to thank for all this hard work!

Unfortunately we almost immediately ran into our first big problem.  (Well, ok, our first big problem HERE at the base; I'll tell you some other time about all our trials and tribulation during the design, testing, and calibration phases…)  We found that our telescope is not well aligned, meaning that the optics are not pointing precisely at correct points on the detectors (X-ray cameras).  We found this by pointing a laser at the optics and placing a piece of paper where the detectors will go so that you can see the focused pattern, or in this case the UNfocused pattern.  The offset is not so bad that the experiment won't work, but we'd like to do better!  So we spent yesterday and today trying to come up with a way to fix the alignment.

Some exciting news: we're overlapping by about a week with the previous sounding rocket team.  They're scheduled to launch very late Friday night / early Saturday morning (around 4 am)…and we can go watch!  We unanimously agreed that the chance to see a rocket launch, even if it's not ours, is well worth staying up til the wee hours of the morning…and we have plenty of work to keep us busy til then!