The Mission Ends, and Afternotes

The Mission Ends

I would not stay around to see the mission end.  Once the instrument was airborne, there was no further purpose for our lab in the airplane hangar, and my job title became moving man and trucker.  The packing went ok, but on the way home I ran into another weather condition: severe thunderstorms.  Driving the broad-sided truck east on Highway 12, it was a challenge to keep it in my lane.  The rain slowed me down but fortunately, the wind was not enough to blow me over.  I thought about how fickle the spring weather in the Midwest could be.  After weeks of steady wind, the short window of calm that permitted a balloon launch was followed by a gale force blast, perhaps to compensate and bring the average wind speed back up to the South Dakota standard.

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Instrument Troubleshooting, Feeding the Magnet

Instrument Troubleshooting

Cosmic ray instruments are complex and it seems there is always something that needs adjusting or fixing or calibrating, and then testing and confirming and re-calibrating.  This is what consumed our time while waiting for the wind to die down.  And it is a good thing to have had that time to do those last ground tests, because we encountered a troubling condition—an intermittent false trigger.  

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