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"It's Flight
Hardware!"Caption: The stickers on the container tell the story: It's going to Mars and one better be careful with it.
Setting up
the Test Equipment and Unpacking MOCCaption: Getting ready to test the MOC in the cleanroom (Space Science Building Room 201) at LMA.
Upper Right: Testing the Ground Support Equipment (GSE) before attaching it to the MOC. Here, Steve LaBrecque measures the power supply.
Middle Left: Steve and Jose Tamayo taking the cover off the MOC shipping container.
Middle Right: Steve and Jose lifting the MOC out of the shipping container using the "wrap-around" handling fixture. The MOC weighs about 20.5 kg (45 lbs.).
Lower Left: Carrying the MOC over to the air-ride table. Mike Clawson provides QA support.
Lower Right: Jose inspects the interior baffles, blankets, and the primary mirror of the narrow angle telescope for any damage or dirt associated with the transport.
Testing the
MOCAfter unpacking everything, and attaching the MOC to the GSE, we began a series of functional and performance tests as part of the delivery acceptance criteria.
Caption: Optical alignment and performance were measured to compare with previous results.
Upper right: The optical test set-up for the NA camera. Collimator on the left has been auto-collimated and the tilted-bar target placed at the appropriate offset for the "wet, warm" conditions on Earth (the focus of both the collimator and NA vary by several 100 mils owing to temperature and water absorption in the graphite/epoxy structure). Note the N2 gas bottles providing purge gas to the NA focal plane (to prevent dust from falling on the FPA, where it can't be cleaned off later) and the hygrometer to measure the humidity of the cleanroom (testing was delayed about a day while we worked to raise the humidity--the FPAs are very ESD-sensitive).
Middle Left: The optical stage used to autocollimate the collimator.
Middle Right: The moving target generator. A fiber optic light source shines on a diffusing screen (middle), which casts the diffuse light onto the moving target, which oscillates left to right and back again. The total motion is less than the width of the diffuser, and the speed is roughly 1 Hz.
Lower Left: Ed Motts (JPL optical engineer) measures the alignment of the NA optic axis against the alignment cube. He views the NA FPA through the telescope on the theodolite, and measures the angle between the location halfway between the two NA detectors and the axes of the cube. He also uses the porroprism (behind and to the right) to measure the other angles with respect to the cube. The MOC GSE in the background consists of a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation IPX (on the table) and, mounted in the Lunar Surveyor vintage rack, the MOC power supply, the PDS emulator, and the PDS/GSE interface box (top to bottom).
Lower Right: Mike Caplinger observes the NA FPA with a C90 telescope from in front of the Wide Angle target. The bar pattern on the target permits the WA along- and cross- track alignment to be determined for both the red and blue cameras, relative to one another. Once the location on the WA target of the NA optic axis is determined, these measurements can then be referenced both to the NA camera (so we can tell where the NA FOV occurs in the WA images) and, through the NA alignment, to the spacecraft control axes.
After the NA testing was completed, and the WA fixed (see next section) and it's testing finished, we had part of an evening left before "going on the spacecraft" the following afternoon. Following a "tradition" we started at General Electric with the MOC 1, we took images of various personnel associated with the camera or spacecraft using the WA cameras.
There are several challenging aspects of taking pictures with the WA cameras. The target must move at a slow (<1 inch per second), constant rate. Illuminating the target is tricky, since the red camera is much more sensitive than the blue camera, and most light sources are blue deficient. In the case of cleanroom imaging, we used the wheeled base of a waste receptacle, and a member of the MOC team would slowly pull the person standing on the wheels through the WA FOV. At about 25 feet from the detectors, we were just within the near-field focus of the cameras.
Caption: Imaging with the MOC 2 Wide Angle Cameras
Middle: The resulting MOC Red WA image acquired by pulling Danielson through the FOV. Such MOC images require recasting one's idea of a picture: the background is the unmoving, oft-repeated image of a single, vertical line through the ceiling, WA target, and floor, roughly a centimeter across. The foreground image (Danielson, Malin's hand, and the wheeled cart) is the view as each moves through the same 1 cm field of view. The jaggedness (along Danielson's leg, for example) comes from variations in speed. Images taken when the "puller" was pulling too quickly result in very thin targets; pulling too slowly results in very fat people.
Right: After moving the lamps in front of the cart, a few color images were acquired. This image, of Malin, shows color fringing that results from three factors: the uneven motion, the parallax between the two cameras (red and blue), and the slight twist between the two cameras. The signal-to-noise ratio of the blue image is very poor because both the overhead fluorescent lights and the photoflood light bulbs in the the lighting fixture are relatively deficient in light between 400 and 450 nm.
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