The far infrared focal planes were completed at the University of Arizona, just in time for delivery to the instrument team at Ball Aerospace in late summer/early fall 1999.
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Here's Erick Young at Ball making the delivery of the 70 micron focal plane. Be careful, Erick! |
| And here it is. The detectors are to the right, but are hidden by a filter mounted over the face of the array. The molybdenum frames and readouts are in the black housing, while a flex cable backplane is enclosed in the box at the back. |
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The 160 micron array was a more difficult delivery. Here Rick Schnurr makes one more effort to assemble a flawless one. |
| The completed array is a thing of beauty. The optical concentrators are across the top, behind them are the stress rigs, with the baseplate below. | 
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And the Si:As BIB array, from the Infrared Spectrograph team and Boeing North America. The array itself is the grey square in the center, but it is surrounded by supporting circuitry and everything is mounted on an aluminum radiation shield. |
| QMC Industries, with collaborator Peter Ade, provided the far infrared filters. | 
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Jeff Beeman, of LBNL, made the reverse bolometer calibration stimulators. |
| John Schwenker tries to figure out how to put it all together at Ball. | 
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Here is the completed instrument. It was officially delivered in May, 2000. |
| Again, this time with its cover installed and mounted on the Multi-Instrument Chamber (MIC) baseplate. IRS is occulted in the background. Somewhat sadly, we have to say we hope never to see it again (since if we got it back, it would be because it was broken). | 
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