Wednesday, we took off the insulation box from the instrument--for what will hopefully be the last time --in order to get in and double check a couple of wires. While it was open, JohnE and I went through the painstaking process of double-checking the wiring of the instrument signal cables. Each of the 552 Photomultiplier Tubes (PMTs) on Super-TIGER has a wire going in that provides power and a wire coming out that gives us the signal. If everything is plugged in properly, then turning down the power on one tube causes a change in the signal on that same channel. In other words, if I reduce the voltage on tube 7, and tube 7 suddenly has a lower signal, things are going well. If this doesn't happen, we may have gotten the cables swapped. We went through each and every channel and made sure that everything was connected properly before the insulation layer went back on. I also took that opportunity to take a bunch of pictures of the instrument just in case we need them later.
We also had a planning meeting about the scheduling for the next week or so. Before Super-TIGER is flight-ready, we need to pass a "Hang Test", where they take the payload and hang it from the launch vehicle (essentially a large crane, for these purposes) outside and we essentially pretend that it is in flight, and can only talk to it using our various antenna links. Before that happens, we want everything working, so we'll shoot to have a pre-Hang-Test-test out on the deck of our building early next week, with the Hang Test coming a couple of days later.
Other than that, we kept things running the way we have been for the last week or so, taking as much muon data as we can. Since this is the only opportunity we have to run everything in a controlled environment, we want to make sure we're familiar with how everything works.
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