Monday June 7th started off with reinstalling everything we took out of the airplane back into its original location. The DC8 was already parked outside for the tarmac tests that would be done later that evening. The blazing sun made the airplane into a sauna and the washing of the flight suits, which occurred over the weekend, spurious. Nevertheless we had our system back up and running in time for the calibrations. Although, so it seemed.
Having the windows and lenses cleaned, we did a final check of the recording system - leaving us with the following image on the screen:
a blue screen of death… After that not all cameras came back up. As a result the night ended with only 2 cameras calibrated. The high speed camera with the 400mm lens (the large one) did however work and we will most likely have another chance to calibrate our system later this week in Melbourne.
In the middle of the night, on our way back to the hotel, we had a conversation with Tech5, the developer of the TERAS instrument to figure out how to solve our problems. They responded immediately, so we can now try to get things sorted out during the transfer flight to Hawaii.
Hawaii will be the place where we will spend the night and refuel, after which we will head for Melbourne. During these flights some extra time is available to get our setup, called TERAS (monster in greek), back into shape.
