Day 3 - we're going to need a bigger scan

First thing this morning when i came in i was trying to get our C-scan program to produce a result. But after messing around with lab view (the editor/compiler for the program) I noticed that the problem stemmed from an issue with the temp folder not being able to be overwritten. Lucky for me, mike (a MET graduate student) came over to help me out. Mike showed me that when the program fails it doesn't have time to dump the temp folder and leaves garbage files in it. Right before lunch we got the program working and took a small B-scan of the paper. To the right is one of the B-scans we generated,

and shows just noise until about 20,000 microns and then air, that line at about 50,000 microns is the paper. Since this turned out pretty well we decided to do a much larger scan, a scan so large we later found out it has never been attempted before. And yes it was to large we estimated it would have taken 2 hours of just sampling not even including post processing. So after lunch we canceled the scan and went on with smaller scans. also through out the day I went and visited Matt in the space weather lab, Jason in the astronomy lab, and Elaine in the MRI lab to see what everyone was working on.