After countless anxious phone calls, emails & text messages back & forth over the past few days, an enormous truck eventually trundled up the hill just after 7pm this evening...
It's hard to convey the surrealness of the scene. A very dark, clear, cold & windy night on the plateau, interrupted by a gigantic truck, ablaze with lights, gingerly threading its way along the road.
Then Eben, perfectly dressed for a summer afternoon, hops into the forklift & races out to meet it.
Our huge crate at the very back of the load is dwarfed by the massive truck, that's somehow branded with with advertising for boutique kitchens. Of course.
But they've driven straight from Joburg & somehow made it up the steep Verlatenkloof pass to reach Sutherland, so everyone's Very relieved to see it - whatever the truck says!
A few more nervous moments getting it out of the truck safely...
Then reversing all the way down the SALT driveway & over to the loading bay with the 680 kg crate.
Sneaking past the container that the rest of the instrument arrived in back at the start of May.
Then safely into the loading bay, & thankfully out of the freezing cold!
Happily, the handling indicators on the crate all looked good, so no major abuses had been endured in making its way across the world.
Given the delays in getting the cable here & all that still needs to happen before the Wisconsin team & several of us from the Observatory head to Montreal for the SPIE conference, this was only part of the action for the evening.
Mike & the gang fell upon the crate, eagerly tearing it apart like a bunch of hungry lions!
Here's what approximately 11 km worth of optical fibre for a near-infrared spectrograph looks like! The 4 cables are each carefully wound around pairs of large reels, in figure-8's so that they'll unspool sensibly when we install the cable.
Off to the spectrometer room, so that the head end can be installed in the fibre instrument feed (FIF) & its position mapped in preparation for installation.
Each pair of reels gets its own trolley to ride around on.
The strain relief boxes & the ends that go into the slit are stowed below the reels.
The head end of the cable, that will plug into the FIF, wore a sturdy but slightly flexible protective trunk, with a 3-D printed end-cap, for the occasion.
This is where the 4 cables all come together - at the break-out box, being supported here by fibre cable wizard extraordinaire, Joshua.
After a fair amount of wrangling, the 4 trolleys were neatly lined up - as if ready to watch the show due to play out on the optical bench.
This arrangement allowed the break-out box & integral field unit (IFU) to be secured to the bench, where the FIF was mounted.
Removing the metallic elephant trunk & then the plastic shrouds protecting the end revealed the scary bit - the sections of bare fibres (the fine brownish coloured strands) emerging from the kevlar-lined conduits.
With the masking tape removed you can see the stainless steel blocks where the fibres terminate. The block on the left contains the fibres for the sky bundle & the one on the right is the science IFU.
Here's a face-on view showing the 62 fibres in the sky bundle & the 228 in the IFU. These include a number of spares, so there will be 36 & 212 active fibres in the sky & object bundles, respectively.
We shone some light into one of the 4 batches of fibres, illuminating some sky fibres on the left & part of the science IFU on the right. It's impossible to overstate how beautifully made these are, really Really superb work by Joshua in particular!
The aftermath of a very busy evening! But like any good party, the clean-up's for another day...
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