Integration time

For the first couple weeks at White Sands, we were occupied with finishing up the experiment section of the payload.  This meant some late nights as we scrambled to put on the final touches!  That was our last opportunity to work with the pieces of our experiment before everything gets melded together.  Final calibrations, alignment checks, etc all had to be done while we could still get our hands on our hardware.  Afterward we started the process of putting the experiment in the rocket "skins" -- the outside shell of the rocket.  And then we began to put the experiment section together with the other subsystems (communications, guidance, power, pointing) that make up the entire payload.

This wasn't a painless process!  We stumbled across many issues here and there -- a relay that wouldn't work, a shutter door that refused open for a good long time -- but in the end we were able to get past each of these difficulties.  We're grateful to the NSROC teams, from both White Sands and Wallops, for putting in long hours to solve these problems.

That brings us up to the vibration test, which was a dramatic enough occurrence that I'll save it for another post.  (Always nice to end on a cliffhanger...!)

The FOXSI experiment in place for X-ray alignments.  Steven eyes his fancy new alignment system.

El Zorrito, our mascot, helps out by writing a bit of code...

This shutter door will open in space to expose our X-ray optics to the Sun!  The X-ray optics are behind the orange thermal blanket.

Electrical connections with other (non-experiment) sections of the payload.  This is the payload guts that you won't see when it's all put in the rocket skins.

Gently maneuvering the experiment section -- now in the rocket skins -- onto a cart using a crane.

The team after adding thermal blankets around the experiment.  It's looking more like a rocket every day!