It has been a busy week here at the Canadian Space Agency's balloon base in Timmins. BVEX (and all its many associated electronics boxes) was integrated on to the balloon gondola last week. We spent a few days routing all our electronics cables and getting everything ready.
Next we spent a few days testing how we will coordinate pointing our telescope with the CSA team. They control where the balloon gondola points in azimuth (left-right) and we control how our telescope points in elevation (up-down). We spent a lot of time mapping the Sun with BVEX while suspended from a transporter vehicle.
On Tuesday we did the end to end tests, where all of the science experiments on our gondola turned on their systems and the CSA monitored how much power we used and whether any of our systems were interfering with their electronic systems. After this test we our gondola was officially ready for flight and now we just have to wait for the weather to cooperate!
In the meantime some of our team, Stephanie, Maggie, and Aarchi, have had to return to Kingston to get ready for classes next week. Before Maggie and Aarchi left we all signed base of the telescope.
We have been mostly resting and catching up on sleep after a busy two weeks for the past two days. However, the forecast looks promising for tomorrow night, so we may have a chance to launch soon!