Thanksgiving Day: November 22, 2012

The official Thanksgiving holiday for most of McMurdo will be on Saturday, and we will have an "official" Thanksgiving dinner then, but for lunch on Thursday the LDB Galley staff went all out. We arrived to find the tables re-arranged into two long tables for everyone to sit at, as well as an impressive Thanksgiving feast.

I also found out that Sweet Potato Pie is an acceptable substitute for Pumpkin Pie.

Back in the payload building, the BLAST folks were getting ready for a test that would take them outside to the deck of our building. They got things out the door in the afternoon and got to work. We opened up the insulation of the bottom of one of the modules so that Richard could get at an electronics box. One of the electronics boards needed a resistor replaced, but once that was done Richard got the box back together and ready to go.

Throughout the day, I talked with JohnE and Makoto about adjusting the voltages on individual photomultiplier tubes for the next step in our calibration process. We keep making smaller changes to try and get things working the way we want them. We'll try out these values on a Muon test on Friday. Thursday afternoon, Kenichi showed the monitoring website he had been working on. This site essentially uses the data sent down from the instrument and converts it into graphs that will (eventually) be available for our monitoring team to monitor from anywhere. The plan is to have one shift of people monitoring the instrument during flight here on the ice, with shifts in the US picking up the rest of the day, but that will get finalized later.

Super-TIGER in on schedule and everything seems to be working properly, so we certainly have a lot to be thankful for.