Day 8 (Tuesday, Feb. 28)

Today's the day we had planned on going home, but (surprise!) it turns out there's more work to do!  We've pushed our California return back to Friday to give us a few more days to work out some problems with the optics and the detector system.  Since we're staying longer this means we'll get another chance to watch them attempt to launch the CalTech rocket!  (That's the other team that's here now.)  That's on the schedule for Thursday night / Friday morning.

Some of the most important work was to epoxy (glue) a holder onto an optic that had slightly detached.  This piece holds the optic in the telescope but had come off due to degraded epoxy.  Could this have happened during vibration tests?  As you can imagine, when the rocket launches the instrument gets shaken quite a lot, at amplitudes up to 10 times gravity!  One of the tests we have to do is to make sure the equipment can hold up under that kind of vibration.  So we put it on a special table that mimics the vibration of the rocket to check if any parts break.  This vibe test has been done a couple of times on this optic over the last year…maybe the detachment happened then but we just didn't notice until we tried to install it in the telescope.  Obviously this led to a lot of concern about the state of the other optics, but we checked them all and they all have a good layer of intact epoxy.