After a quick, early morning trip to the grocery store, we managed to stock our refrigerator and enjoy a nice team breakfast at the chateaux. Today the weather is warm and pleasant. We learned late yesterday that Novespace would not be open until 14:00h today so we were treated to a slow, relaxing start to the day.

In the garden.

In the living room.

In the dining room.

We began by trying out the wi-fi service on the grounds. Unfortunately, the large stone walls of the chateaux tend to block the signal coming from the owner's main office, right next door to us. He kindly lent us a cable ethernet connection so that we could hook up at least one laptop to the wall connection. Later we tried a wireless access point to amplify the signal from the upstairs bedroom where a wireless connection was available on the outer ledge of the window, as well as through the land connection on the ground floor of the house. Unfortunately both attempts were unsuccessful.
At 14:00h we arrived at Novespace along with 2 other flight teams. The Novespace building is a small mobile building across from the main runway at the Bordeaux airport. Commercial flights take off and land frequently. Fortunately the roar of fighter jets from the nearby military airport are less frequent. The A300 Zero-G plane is parked close by, but we don't yet have access to it. We collected our shipment of two experiment racks, three metal containers with supplies, and two boxes of spare parts from the workshop and claimed a small corner to begin unboarding and unpacking everything.

The Novespace building.

The A300 Zero-G plane.

Examining the experiment rack and chamber.

The team quickly dismantles the entire experiment chamber to inspect everything since it was last tested in, and shipped from, Braunschweig. We also need to replace the heating system at the base of the experiment where the primary heaters failed during warming of the copper block after a cooling test. Without a way to heat the experiment, the vacuum chamber is untouchable for 2 days while the internal temperature slowly warms from liquid nitrogen temperatures (80 K) to a temperature above the freezing point of water (273 K). Opening the vacuum chamber prematurely would allow water from the air to freeze immediately onto the experiment, irreversibly damaging vacuum seals and other components in the experiment. As a result, performing cooling tests can be very time consuming.

Replacing the heating system.

The experiment unhoused.

Modifying the electrical feedthroughs.

By the end of the day, the experiment had been reassembled with a new heating system. Early testing of this system anticipates that we will need just 3 hours to warm everything up after an ice experiment. This will still be a tight fit on flight days, but it is a promising result if we hope to perform one last cooling test before the flight week.