Wednesday, August 10, 2011

DPS ready for dust testing

The dust position sensor (DPS) is finished and ready to give the position of its first dust particles during a test run in the small accelerator tomorrow. Similar to the dust trajectory sensor (DTS), DPS reads the pulses from induced charges on a grid of wires as a charged particle flies through. Comparing the pulses from each wire allows us to pinpoint the position of the particle. Unlike the DTS, the DPS is small enough to fit inside the beamline and can be placed in a number of locations.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

LDEX flight model is here!!



Exciting news, our first piece of flight hardware is now being calibrated in our dust accelerator. This gives us some serious clout in the dust and space community! A week or two ago we shot dust at the engineering model, which was cool, but this is the real deal! Sorry for the poor picture quality, there wasn't enough light.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Hi Everyone,
I've been meaning to create a YouTube account for the lab for a while now and finally got around to it.  This is a time lapse I made using images captured from the dustcam while we were building the accelerator.  Whenever we get cool videos we'll be sure to post them to our account, TheCCLDAS.  Hope you guys like it!
Shu