For the obvious reasons, I invariably get too busy to blog exactly when things get interesting...
 Targets at 1 km |
 Mark Boots and Nathan Windels in front of the main "barrel cam" display, showing the dark (unlit) target at 1 km |
 Note the bright (lit) PV target at 1 km. In the background, Ariq Chowdhury is monitoring the climber telemetry data. |
 USST's beam director station |
Tuesday and Wednesday were dedicated to field testing – as much as we can get done before the helicopter flight on Thursday.
While KCSP are here for their second round of testing, USST is here for their first, and so they get priority on the laser.
Because of several late-in-the-game design changes, quite a bit of USST’s system is still untested, so there’s a lot of tension in the air – if a major flaw shows up, there might not be enough time for them to fix it.
The initial tests are successful, and establish that tracking works, that the beam director can handle full power (that was a big unknown) and that the climber can take this photonic power and extract enough electrical power out of it to make them competitive. This is also the stage where we look at reflections coming off of the climber, and confirm that no significant reflection go outside of a 15 degree cone from the vertical.
In true USST fashion, everything just falls into place. They might be late coming into the party, but once they’re there, they catch up awfully quick.
With qualification behind them, USST spends Friday on system optimizations, measuring power and temperature profiles, and making sure they can get the most amount of power out of their PV array.