Here we are on May 13th, the night before my friend and boss Ryan leaves Summit camp and we still don't have a working instrument. It all started on Sunday evening, Mother's Day. We had a slow afternoon, figuring that all we had left to do was one last tweak of the alignment of the laser and we would be done. Saturday night we had the best signal we've ever seen from this system, great altitudes and a signal that we could adjust to what ever strength we wanted. We headed out after dinner for the last push and it happened. One laser dead, the other at 1/10th the power it was supposed to. What had we done? What happened? Panic crept into the MSF and things started going horribly wrong.
The one working laser had no power to see anything. Then as I was cleaning out the second power supply, it fell off of its stand and sheared off the two coolant lines on the back of it. By this time it was 2 am (our supposed quitting time) and full blown panic set in. Sunday night/ Monday morning I finally could not stay awake any longer and I went to be at 5 am. Ryan stayed up to try and resurrect one of the lasers. I was awoken at 10 am by the station personnel cutting off the power to my CPAP, and being unable to go back to sleep I got up. Ryan had been busy getting phone numbers and contacts for the company which made the lasers. At 1 pm we had a conference call with them and they went to work coming up with troubleshooting procedures for us. About 2 pm we got off the phone and headed back out to the MSF.
What did we find? Well when we took the covers off of the one working laser head, we found water in a small puddle at the bottom of it. Lasers don't like water, they hate it in fact, except when it used to cool them. We had found one of our problems with Laser #2. The other part of the problem with #2 was that according to the company we needed both of the power units powered on for the electronics in the Co-Alignment block to activate and allow the laser light through it. Since I had inadvertently sheared off the coolant lines, we had turn it off. This had the effect of crippling laser #2. A few hours of work later (about dinner time) we had #2 dried out and ready to try coming back on. We held our breaths and turned it on, it worked. We had resurrected one of the two lasers, now we needed to work on #1.
After dinner Ryan and I headed back out to the MSF and started taking #1 apart. This time when we took the cover off of the laser head, water poured out of it. We had a large leak to take care of this time. While we were waiting for the laser to dry out, we started trying to align laser #2 to the telescope. Nothing we did seemed to make a difference. Finally around 9 pm Ryan fell asleep during one of the adjustments. He crawled into the sleeping bag we have in the MSF and asked me to wake him at 11 pm. I wend back to the Big House and ate my usual Breakfast for Dinner. At 11 pm I wend out to the MSF again and woke Ryan, the way he responded I canceled everything for the rest of the night so he could sleep.
Today we got out here after lunch and performed another purge/drying of Laser#1. This time it seemed to work and mid afternoon we had #1 back online and running. The unfortunate part of this is that Ryan leaves at 10:30 AM tomorrow morning. We still don't have a functioning instrument and we don't know what else to try. We will be out here until late this evening again, hoping that we some how get the system to respond and get a good signal out of it.
More to come tomorrow.
He is Risen
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