Another week winding down.

This week set the stage for experiments to be run next week. The calibration set up is nearly finished (just one more piece to glue in place). Nick Michel-Hart, the engineer working on the REMUS vehicles, was able to get an o-ring groove put on the top end cap so that it will be sealed but still removable. I want to stress the awesomeness of his feat: typically to get an o-ring groove put in, you submit the work to the machine shop and it takes weeks. Nick was able to submit it to the machine shop and have it done in one day. The project hinged on having that done, so he literally did save the day...and the next three weeks, for that matter. Thank you, Nick!

Currently, Megan Schatz at the Oceanography Dept. here at the UW is growing cultures of Thaalssiosira weissflogii for calibrations next week. She will give us a liter of culture for laboratory calibrations, and we'll submit a liter to Aaron Morello in Oceanography. He will do a chlorophyll extraction and analysis while we run the in vivo fluorometer calibration. This will tell us how much chlorophyll is present in a known biomass.

Hopefully by the end of today, the calibration set up will be done and we can confirm that we can pump dionized water through with no problems. Fingers crossed!

Until next week,
Kysa