Ant's been up here trying out his NIR control (NCON) software, the interface that observers will use to run the instrument. It talks to all the lower level software that was written by Jeff Percival in Wisconsin. All of their Many conversations over the past months have clearly paid off as it's all working swimmingly so far - hence the huge grin behind the mask!
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| LabVIEW happpppiness! |
The main event for the week was the trial "installation" of a dummy fibre cable, to iron out the process to be employed when routing the science cable that's due to arrive within a week or so.
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| The real cable will NOT do this!! |
The fibre cable was simulated with a set of four 30-m long hose-pipes, clamped together in the same way that the four strands of the science cable will be arranged.
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| There's also a dummy breakout box at the FIF end |
The actual cable is nearly 50% longer, much less flexible & VASTLY heavier, being filled with 250 strands of glass rather than air - but still, this is a great way to figure out what will work & what won't...
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| No - that's definitely not an acceptable bend radius... |
The fun starts down in the spectrometer room, where the cable gets fed up through the hole in the roof, into the bottom of the pintle bearing.
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| Nicolaas & Johan starting the process |
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| Denville feeding the cable along from the loading bay |
Mike & Eben were at the top of the pintle bearing, to feed it up through the mirror truss.
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| Coming out the top of the pintle bearing |
Then it goes out through the structure & down to the telescope floor.
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| Alrin receives the business end out on the telescope structure |
Then it's over to the cherry-picker crane to reach the first attachment point + pulley on the front leg of the telescope structure.
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| Conveniently, Eben is fundamentally immune to cold - a Sutherland superpower |
Those down on the floor had to wrangle the length of cable beside the telescope pier.
The game is to avoid pulling on the cable at all, as that will stress the fibres. So there are clamps every few metres where ropes can be attached to help lift & guide it, and there's a tensile element strung between the hoses which takes the load.
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| We have lift-off! |
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| The next attachment point |
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| Mechanicals thinking aloud |
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| Jonathan & Denville waiting to receive it up on the tracker |
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Marsha doing her SALT yoga moves
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The breakout box was secured up at the top by the end of the day & since the weather was foul, there was no hope of observing over night. So today the guys could pick up where they'd left off yesterday & tune the routing to accommodate the full range of motion of the tracker.
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| Enough slack for the tracker's full range of motion |
That allowed them to make measurements & sort out the various attachment points, all of which will make things easier when dealing with the real cable next time.
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| With the relevant lengths measured, they could position the final attachment points |
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| Ready for the real thing... |
This was a big job, but hugely worthwhile - knowing what we know now, everyone feels a Lot better about installing the science cable!
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