As of March 7, 2005, we have retreived all our hardware from the University of Maryland
that went to the ice. Following is an accounting of what survived, and it seems to be
mostly good news.
All of our electronics boxes have been returned and look to be in working order, but we
will need to fire them up to be certain this is the case. The TCD power supply box has
also been recovered along with the power distribution circuit boards. Three of the 4
network switches were also recovered.
We knew that the paddles had been chopped up, but we were under the assumption that a
saw had been used. In fact the light guides had just been snapped off of the scintillator,
for the most part leaving a fairly clean break. This is a "feature" of the glue we used,
it becomes brittle when exposed to the cold. We had been concerned this might cause a
problem, but in fact it worked very much in our favor during the recovery operation.
The only potential complaint we could make is that the high voltage cables to the tubes
only had on average a couple of inches of cable left from where they had been chopped off.
We may be able to use some kind of Reynold's connector or potted splice to reuse the
tubes without repotting the entire bas. As Opher said, anyone who wants to complain can
go next year...
Not all of the breaks were perfectly clean, and the scintillator took the brunt of the
damage. Of the 8 pieces returned to PSU, 4 of them were damaged badly enough that we
probably won't want to use them. (One or two of them could probably be used in a real
pinch.)
Photos of good scintillator can be seen here:
1
2
Photos of the damaged scintillator can be seen here:
1
2
3
4
5
6
As I said above, most of the light guides were undamaged. Three of them did have the
glue joint between the light guide and the bent lucite break, but I believe this to be
repairable. Several of the PMTs also came unglued. Three of these suffered a bit of
damage to their SMB connectors and will have to be repaired or replaced.
An Excel spreadsheet detailing the current status of each of the light guides can be
found here.
Photos of damaged PMT (hard to get in focus because of reflective foil):
1
2
Photos of damaged light guides:
1
2
3
4
Photos of undamaged light guides
1
2
(Note: Discoloration is from remnants of the glue peeling up.)
All of these pictures can be found at:
ftp://epona.phys.psu.edu/picts/CREAM1_recovered_hardware
or you can download a gzip tar file here.
Thanks go out to Opher Ganel, Mike Smolinski, and the whole NSBF recovery team for an
excellent recovery.
Feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.
Nick
