Today's mission for Eben, Nicolaas, Etienne, Denville, Timmy & Thabelo was removing the payload. To simplify that, most of the major chunks were extracted while the rotating structure was still on the tracker. The FIF (fibre instrument feed), HRS guider, SALTICAM & ADC (atmospheric dispersion compensator) all skipped the crane ride.
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| Extracting the heavy, fragile bits from inside the payload |
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| As with RSS, the payload was lifted out & then the structure rotated away from underneath it |
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| It was then carefully lowered to the ground floor with the dome crane |
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| RSS (left) & the payload (front) now share the spectrometer room with HRS (in the black enclosure on the right) |
Tomorrow's a public holiday due to local government elections, so work will only start after voting in the morning. The electricals need to finish getting RSS & the payload operational while the mechanicals will start with the daunting task of removing pairs of hexapod legs to replace the tracker ball joints.
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