7/18 Cool Note From Anna on Page 3: Aerogel Schematic

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fjgiie
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July 14th Update

Post by fjgiie »

Hi Dr. Anna Butterworth,
Thanks for sharing your hard work with us. :)
It looks like tiles 1014, 17, 18, 26, 28, 29, 32 are ready. Also tiles 1001, 4, 5, 7 are scanned. Tiles needing rescanning are 1013, 15, 16, 27, 30, 31. Tile 1016 was pending but in July 18th update it appears focus was too high and will have to be rescanned.

Now my question about go, no-go. Would these two examples be correct as far as you are concerned? Tile 1028-go and tile 1027-no go?
Tiles 1030 and 1031 no go and tile 1032-go?

It appears the roughness of the surface of these aerogel tiles is really causing the focus problems. An unexpected development I guess.

Thanks,
fjgiie
albutterworth
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Post by albutterworth »

Hi fjgiie
Hi Dr. Anna Butterworth,
please, call me Anna
:)


Yes you are quite right, tiles I013, 16, 27, 30, 31 will need to be rescanned.
Tiles I015 and I031 were already rescans. It seems that some tiles are much harder to do than others. My feeling is we just scan some other tiles and come back to the tricky ones much later in the project.



Here's how we scan the tiles:
In the Cosmic Dust Lab in Houston, Ron Bastien focuses on 200 points on an aerogel tile. He measures the height of the aerogel surface at each point. Part of the programming then takes over and mathematically fits a surface through those points for that whole tile.

We call the result a focus map, and that's what the automated scanning system uses to estimate how to focus at each of the 5000 or so points where it captures the movie.

One problem for Ron can be that the Stardust aerogel is so clean that it's difficult to find the surface. (Of course we're very happy that the aerogel is so clean so whatever dust we do find has minimal contamination).

From Berkeley, Andrew Westphal and I can connect remotely to the scanning computer and help to troubleshoot if necessary. Once it's all running we can keep an eye on things during the 20 hours of scanning that it takes to cover the entire tile.



We're hoping that, as with all science experiments, we simply get better at this as we go along


cheers
Anna
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