Shaken, not stirred

The El Paso airport is starting to feel very familiar.  Not only have I flown in or out of it 7 times already this year, but I've spent a decent amount of time in the arrival lounge, where I'm currently waiting for another member of the FOXSI team to arrive.  Las Cruces is about an hour north of El Paso, and there are not very convenient ways to get between the two cities, so I've been shuttling people back and forth as needed.  (The alternative is a very expensive taxi ride!)

The guy I'm waiting for now is Saito, a grad student at the University of Tokyo.  He and Ishikawa did most of the preliminary work on the FOXSI detectors in Japan, and they are both joining us for the rocket launch.  Later this week two more FOXSI friends, Jose and Jason, will show up, just in time for the flight on Friday.

That rounds out the team that's already here: our fearless leader Säm, who splits his time between Berkeley and Switzerland and brings us delicious Swiss chocolates whenever he visits; Steven, our project manager extraordinaire who was instrumental in writing the FOXSI proposal and getting FOXSI going in the first place; Ishikawa, who flew in from Japan two weeks ago to help out during the integration process; Paul, the head of mechanical engineering at SSL (aka rocket MacGyver); and yours truly, providing detector work and an endless supply of corny jokes.  Not able to join us are are two SSL engineers who have been vital to the project -- David and McBride.  They will be missed!

But on to the exciting news -- FOXSI has passed our vibration test!  Those of you who have been closely following the blog since February (that's you, Mom!) will remember that one of the important steps in getting the rocket ready for launch is to shake the living daylights out of it to make sure it can withstand the high stresses it will experience at launch.  After the vibration test we take the rocket apart and test out all the various systems to make sure nothing came loose.  And in our case our post-vibe tests were successful, with no apparent problems.  This is one of the last major milestones we needed to clear before launch, so at this point there are very few potential obstacles in our way!

This week we will start loading the rocket onto the launch rail (the structure that it launches from) and practice running the entire sequence of operations remotely while the rocket is on the rail.  Hopefully that will mean some awesome pictures coming soon of the rocket on the rail, depending on when the Navy photographer can get them to us.  And then...Friday is the big day!