Dodecants.

This is my compulsory post du jour. For about a week I'd been planning what I really wanted to write today, but Twila came home and killed him. So I'm thinking about what I want to do about that, and in the meantime, here is my current horror story:

That's a diagram of the end of an optic. The concentric yellow lines are layers of glass and the radial gray lines are spacers. The concentric blue lines form the intermediate mandrel, where we change from sextants to dodecants. (Actually, the people in the lab call them 12tants, but that's only because they're PhDs.) That switch on FM1 is going to happen in about two days.

The reason I'm going all Edgar Allan Poe on that is because the number of spacers per layer is about to double, from 60 to 120. That means that the number of hardware pieces that hold the spacers is also going to double, from 48 to 96. So everyone is going to have twice as much work.

That isn't a bad thing, in itself. Currently my workday is grind-limited. I arrive at 04:15, remove the hardware from FM1 and start the first rough grind, then remove the hardware from FM2 and start the first grind there. The reason I go in so early is to get the grinds done before the techs arrive at 08:15, and the three grinds take a bit over 3 hours. When the initial grinds have been started on both optics, I can breathe a bit easier. I then prepare the hardware for the techs to install the next layer of glass, but I finish that usually with 45 minutes or so to spare. Then I read or something until the final grind finishes on FM2, so I can finish that up and go home. When FM1 goes to dodecants, there will be more hardware to prepare, but I'd rather be working than reading, since I'm being paid. It will also be easier to stay awake.

The scarier part is getting the grinds started early enough. I'm faster at removing the hardware, but there is a limit to how fast I can try to do it - I've learned that heavy pieces of metal have little trouble smashing through the optics, if given the chance. If the NuSTAR mission were to be scrubbed because I broke a bunch of glass, a big bunch of people would be seriously annoyed. I might have to leave the country.

My estimate is that unloading FM1 will take about 15 minutes longer than it does now, which wouldn't be a problem. It would still be ready about the time Tom gets in, and Ilya, who loads FM2, arrives a bit later. If my optimism is justified, I won't have to freak out again until FM2, now on Layer 45, goes to dodecants. I suppose I could get up earlier then, if I had to, but that doesn't hold a lot of appeal.

P.S. Whether you're feeling blue or seeing red, please vote today. If you can, vote several times. The only person more uninformed than the typical American voter is the typical American non-voter. Not that I find that comforting in any way.