FOXSI is revived and so is the blog!

It's been way too long since I updated this, and much has happened!  I'll try to make up for lost time and fill in some details along the way.  But we'll start off with the short version:

After returning from White Sands (and taking some well-deserved vacation), we went back to the heart of the problem: our broken detector boards.  With a couple exceptions there was no way to save the old ones; the readout chips had fractured and were unrepairable.  So we started over from scratch.  We had a lot of help along the way from the extended FOXSI team:  Our friends in Japan provided us with many more detectors and readout chips, enough to make two full sets of FOXSI detectors (a flight set and a backup set).  Chris and Rhonda helped in the painstaking job of gluing the pieces on the boards.  (This is not just a matter of slapping some glue on the pieces and throwing it on…this is epoxy applied via syringe underneath a microscope.)  Ishikawa made a return trip from Japan to help with the detector testing.  Even with all this help there was many a late night spent at the lab troubleshooting, taking data, and improving the readout system.  Two new detector sets is twice the work of one, and even one ain't easy…

We were able to get a launch date for the fall, and so here we are again in the desert.  White Sands is much like I remember it…the weather is warm, the sky is beautiful, and the sunrises and sunsets over the mountains are absolutely breathtaking.  The faces remain the same too -- when we pulled up to the Vehicle Assembly Building to unload the truck we were greeted by what now seem like old friends.

The new launch campaign brings a more prepared payload.  As a team we are more experienced; we've done most of this once before and are better equipped for it.  The experiment is more ready as well, since we used the first time round to work out most of the kinks.  This means we have been using our evenings and weekends to see a little more of the desert, to explore the area, or for some of us, to get some good work done on our dissertation…

This week will get us past many of the major milestones, so wish us luck!  If all goes well we will fly the rocket the morning of November 2.  That's just around the corner, and every day FOXSI is looking more and more like it is ready to fly!