The Unveiling

This morning was off to a great start.
A "full" night's sleep.
A beautiful Texas morning.
Breakfast.

Best of all, we were ON TIME. We left the hotel and arrived at the field before they even opened the gates. There were a couple other teams at the gate and we chatted them up that the friendly people we are and then entered the hangar.

First thing to catch one's eye is the very large airplane in the middle of the building. It was awesome.



Next, we saw our crate with our experiment inside. (Fragile written on every side...)
The two "no stack" cones were still in tact. good.
Hole in the side. not so good.



After a bit of panicking we opened the crate...
Awesome. no cracks.
But the shipping was definitely intense.
We had bent bolts that were holding the experiment rig to the pallet.
Little nuts had fallen off inside the secondary containment.
A bit of spilled Weld-On 40.
But nothing we can't handle.

After that, everyone received an excellent safety brief how we can keep all our appendages and so no emergency ($$$) repairs are needed on any equipment.
Our first job was to label everything that we had so everyone knows what belongs to us. We're label queens.

After a nutritious lunch of PB&J, half the team set out on a shopping voyage for the last few things we needed.
First stop, Home Depot. Handy dandy GPS gave us directions. When we pulled into the parking lot, lo and behold...this Home Depot was nothing but an empty building with orange stripes. So...to the next one! We got most of the things on our list which included buckets, cleaning supplies and foam noodles (to cover the edges of the rig, not just for fun) but no little nuts to replace the ones that were missing.

When the shopping team returned to the hangar with our fancy new merchandise, the other half of the team divulged tales of their exploits. Before quitting time, we noodled most of the rig and took the tank home to work on measurements.

This evening, we attended a "fancy" dinner at an oriental buffet with all the other SEED participants. The Carthaginians sprinkled ourselves around the area to mingle with other schools, because we're not socially awkward.

The last thing we accomplished today was the measuring stick of the fill fractions (awful crucial to our experiment) by measuring the total volume of the tank and other number crunching while a couple of us made sandwiches for the team's lunch tomorrow.

Looking forward to more progress and physiological training in the day to come...