Just got back from a 2 1/2 month trip to lovely Palestine, Texas, where I was working on ANITA-3 integration. Integration involves simply putting everything together and making sure it works. It seems pretty straightforward, but you inevitably run into problems that no one could forsee.
I enjoyed the work: everyday there was a new puzzle to solve. For instance, we spent a week carefully assembling the chain of bits that go from the antennas to the electronics board that both generates a trigger (says "Hey! You should save this") and converts a analogue signal to a digital one (i.e., convert a continuous wave into 1's and 0's). The final connection was made when we lifted and inverted the lid, which had instruments, cables, and filters hanging from it. For each of the 96 channels, we had to find the right two cables and connect them. When we went to put the lid on, we very quickly realized that it wasn\'t going to go together as smoothly as we had planned. So we reconfigured and tried again. And it worked!