MER 2003/Athena Update Week Ending April 20, 2002

So much happened this week that it’s impossible to pick one thing to
write about. The electronics boards for the APXS passed their
vibration tests in Berlin. We finished fixing the problem with the
Mössbauer spectrometer sensor heads that popped up during their
vibration tests last month. The motors that we’ve been waiting months
for that go in the RAT finally arrived. A problem came up in our
camera electronics board that’s going to cost us another two or three
week delay that we can barely afford. And we discovered a problem
with one of the electronic parts inside Mini-TES 2 that we haven’t
figured out how to fix yet. It was quite a week! We’re hoping for a
slightly calmer one this week, but we’re not counting on it.