M3 removal gear & a special visitor

Alex O'Donoghue joined us from London for a couple of days to inspect the clean room & conduct Darragh's performance review in person... Dad does indeed seem to be working particularly hard these days.

Craig came up too, bringing along the gear he designed & built for removing M3. That will be needed for the M2 test & also for the M3 test to be done with the big CGH that's on its way - more about That later...

The M3 removal jig involves 4 car jacks & a pair of trolleys that travel on something like a railway track. The trolleys attach to the M3 cell & once secure, the cell will be detached from the rest of the SAC & whisked away to a comfortable new box.

While all that was happening underneath the SAC, the AMNH Faro Arm was attached to the NRS simulator & prepared for setting up a coordinate system & measuring the invar buttons on M2 & M5...

Knowing now that the various encoders need to be made to work during every measurement & that the errors can be averaged out by getting tons of data, using the Faro has become a team sport. 2 to wrangle the beast & 1 to hold down the insert key on the laptop to collect the 1000 readings per point!