National Aeronautics and Space Administration

I’ve been looking at these same x-ray lines for a few days now. They just tweak something here and there to see if it affects me. I’m staring at them for nearly all day, with only about an hour break when they need to run the ADR to cycle the temperature. It gets a bit tedious, but I remember a wise man saying, “Tedium and solitude are the inseparable companions of scholarship.” At least I’m not in solitude – I always have good company.

But I’m almost done with this stuff — on to bigger and better things! Or at least different things…

Everyone seems pretty happy with how things are working, so most of my time is just spent looking at different x-rays to check out what I can see. They have all of these different set-ups for making the x-rays. I bet space will be a lot more exciting, since I’ll actually be looking at black holes and galaxies and stuff instead of some x-rays made in a little device… but it is pretty cool to be able to see this stuff that human eyes can’t see at all.

I got some photos of one of the set-ups for making x-rays in the lab. They have a lot of fancy names for the equipment, but this is basically how it works: a bunch of electrons are shot at a bit of metal, and x-rays are produced. These are moved through a vacuum chamber (called a “bell jar”), and through a special target that sends them to me. So in the photo, you can see where the x-rays are made and how they make it down to me so I can see them. In the second picture, you can even see one of the cool images of what I saw!

I’m still getting checked out. They’re testing my vision, opening and closing valves, turning things on and off… basically, they making sure that everything is working together properly. So whenever they change something, they ask me to look at some x-rays and tell them what I see.

One of the most important parts of all of these tests is to simulate what it will be like when I’m in space. So they want everything cold and working just like it will on the satellite. Then they can be sure that things will be okay when I’m in orbit, and have some idea of what sort of data I’ll be sending back to Earth.

Everything seems to be checking out okay… the scientists are happy, the engineers are running out of problems to solve, so life is good here!