[TASS] Coming Up for Air

[Tom Droege <droege@WWA.COM>]

I have had a terrible week.  Things have not made sense at all.  In the
end, there were a couple of cold soldered connections that wasted most of
the time.  This gave a very strange indication.  I was just plain lucky to
be looking at the right thing at the right time to see the intermittant.
One problem was an intermittant open in the temperature sensor for camera
1.  This would cause wild swings in the temperature control circuit (which
is a lot of power) which would then put noise into everything else.  The
problem is that I have pretty well isolated this system so it is not very
sensitive to these changes.  Small problems are hard to find.

Searching for these problems, I made several large design changes.  Now I
will have to decide which changes I want to keep and which ones to remove.
This will take a few more days of testing.  Meanwhile, I am hopeful of
getting some more star data.

In spite of everything, I seem to have six working cameras.  Three are
completely up to date with all the changes and have new CCD chips in them.

I am working hard to be ready to leave here with a system for NOFS on about
the 21st of October.  I will not do much of anything else until that system
is sitting here running.

Tom Droege