#the past 48 hours have been so acutely stressful i feel like jelly

[squeakadeeks]

We were explicitly told you should NOT go in the hole. Why did they send you down there???

im allowed to go in the hole. im built different

but heres the whole story. theres no short way to describe it so bear with me:

a few weeks ago a radiation shield got stuck in the bottom of our machine, ~10 feet down a 1.5in diameter tube. the radiation shield prevented us from actually accessing our spectroscopy stage, if we couldn't get it out…the whole 1.5 million dollar machine is completely unusable.

To get it out, we had to break open the chamber. but this involves opening spaces that were previously maintained at a vacuum of well over one million times below atmospheric pressure which is.....intense. (as an aside, cracking open the chamber involved flooding the chamber with pure nitrogen gas to maintain positive pressure, which also flooded the room with nitrogen too....which is a major suffocation risk so we had to work in 10 minute shifts. this also gave us a hard countdown for how long we could attempt to fish the shield out before we ran out of gas. and folks, fishing for a tiny shield at the bottom of such a small shaft was wicked difficult) but we got it! here's shots of the actual extraction:

Once we actually got the bastard out, we have to pump everything back down to ultra high vacuum to protect our surfaces from contaminants before we can do any experiments again. To do that we have to cook the whole maschine like a casserole......and thats why i was in the pit! I had to prepare the hole to support our cryogenic dewar and wrap the exposed chamber in foil

hote doge