If you’ve been following our Twitter, you’ll know that we had a successful launch yesterday! I think it’s safe to say that we were all pretty surprised: from the forecast, it looked like the winds might not line up right and that there might be some safety issues with the trajectory as the balloon ascended to float altitude. But everything turned around, and we had a great launch on a beautiful day! Continue reading
Author: cliosleator (Page 1 of 2)
We have some very sad news to report: Ashraf’s is closing for two months 🙁
Ashraf’s is an Indian restaurant in Wanaka, and it’s definitely the best one. There are four Indian restaurants in town, and most of us have tried all of them. We liked Ashraf’s so much that one week we went there 5 times. As yesterday was their last night, we went there for the past three nights in a row. Continue reading
We’ve been waiting for a good launch day since April 1, and two weeks later we’ve only had one launch attempt that got canceled due to weather. A common question from friends and family back home is: what’s wrong with the weather? Continue reading
I meant to update this a few days ago, but haven’t had a chance yet. It’s been an exciting week: we got the cryostat on the gondola and we have an almost fully built instrument! Continue reading
We keep getting delayed due to shipping, which is pretty frustrating. First, we had to wait to get the card cages sent from Berkeley. As soon as we got those last week, we thought there was nothing preventing us from getting the cryostat on the gondola. But that was before we noticed that our stycast (thermal epoxy) had dried out. We need the stycast to attach heaters and temperature sensors to the cryostat, the electronics boxes, and the gondola. Continue reading
On our first day here, some of us took a pact to take a day off every week: Sunday funday! (If the weather is bad one Sunday we can do a Monday funday instead – it still rhymes). Yesterday most of us hiked near the Rob Roy glacier and got some great views. Here are some pictures from the day. Continue reading
Not too much has happened this week. We’re still waiting for some of our card cages (the electronics that read out the detector signals) to get here from Berkeley. They got shipped separately from the rest of the instrument because we wanted to work with them during the month it took the container to get here. Once we get the card cages, we’ll be able to turn on the rest of the detectors, and start putting them on the gondola. Continue reading
Alan, Alex, Brent, McBride and I arrived in Wanaka yesterday afternoon. This was basically the first thing we saw:
11:00 PM: Less than 12 hours after the previous attempt got called off, we are heading back to LDB to try again… Continue reading
Lately, the weather hasn’t been so great, but we’ve been asked to show for launch attempts anyway. Sometimes the weather has been so bad we haven’t even rolled out! The rationale behind showing anyway is that we really don’t want to risk missing a launch opportunity. I think today is the fourth actual attempt, depending on how we count them. Continue reading