The 4th day in Palestine, Texas was another day or organizing and setting up.  Actually, it at the time it was the most efficient day we had had yet.  Sarah and I managed to finish building the last of the shelves we bought from our controversial Lowe’s trip the day before as well as fill as the shelves up with semi-organized items.  This enabled the two of us to finally move all of the crates and boxes onto our side of the hangar. As I mentioned in a previous post, this was MLK day.  Since MLK day is a federal holiday, our team members were basically the only people at the entire NASA base.  Also, two more members of the AESOP-Lite team arrived in Palestine, James Roth and Robert Johnson.  James is our Senior Technician while Robert is an important collaborator from UC Santa Cruz.  With their help we purged the Nitrogen from the CK (Cherenkov) tank.

John escorting the mangled wasp outside

By the end of the day, we had some semblance of an organized work space.  We even grabbed an extra table to put computers on.  A few other things got done besides arranging equipment.  Pierre-Simon analyzed test data and Brian finished setting everything up for the GSE computers.  We had a mini picture day so that I could put everyone’s portraits up on the People page of the site.  Then a couple of wasps invaded the hangar.  There was mass panic in the hangar as we all scurried around trying to avoid the wasp as it flew about.  I killed one with a hard hat and John killed one with a fly swatter.  It was temporary chaos.  Beyond that, it was a fairly uneventful day.  We got back to work and kept our eyes on the weather forecast.  The next day had a chance for snow, a very rare occurrence in Texas.

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-Matt Collins