15 December, 1996

Today, Tom replaced the laser in the instrument with a new one. The older one was not giving a strong enough output signal. We are still waiting on the filters needed for alignment of the instrument's optics. They should be arriving on a flight tonight. I helped make an ozone reading with the Dobson spectrophotometer that is operated by the Kiwi's in the same building at Arrival Heights. We made three measurments with this instrument, all of them averaging around 330 Dobson units. The instrument was designed in the 1930's, with some modifications in the 1950's. It is still the standard instrument used throughout the world for measurements of the ozone layer. I also helped record some data on voltages and room temperatures, the Kiwi's are hoping to plot this data and analyze its trend so that they can gain a better understanding of the voltage fluctuations one of their other instruments is experiencing. We worked very late last night on coding some of the software and checking the allignment of the laser. The laser is used to measure the beam path of the instrument and is useful in its calibration.