I spent about 9 days at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, earlier this month, along with our SPP EPI-Hi team, using TAMU’s cyclotron to test our instrument. I suppose there are some things I shouldn’t make public, so basically, the photo at the top is of me in front of the huge, thick door to one of the caves (or beam rooms, where the accelerated particles are let through a pipe in a beam to expose whatever a user group wants exposed to the energetic particles). The lower photo is of us in one of our work areas above the cave where our instrument would be exposed to the beam.
My workspace was at the blue chair in the background. My primary responsibility was to set up and run the ground support equipment, i.e. the computers and network to provide real-time data display (as best as we could get it given the state of our flight and GSE software) and to distribute data to the rest of our users for near-realtime or later analysis.
In looking at this photo, I’m struck by the relatively high percentage of bald guys that I work with.