This nine-minute extended audio interview with Konrad Gelbke, NSCL director, was prepared as a supplement to the article in the November 2007 CERN Courier describing the laboratory's summer 2007 reconfiguration and ongoing reaccelerated beam project.
This time-lapse video (available on YouTube) shows an especially busy day in late June during the NSCL summer 2007 reconfiguration. The reconfiguration involved tearing down 40,000 concrete blocks (each weighing 30 lbs) that comprised the walls housing the experimental equipment.
During the 2007 NSCL summer configuration, much experimental equipment needed to be moved — including the Modular Neutron Array, or MoNA. The array was built primarily by undergraduates from a handful of colleges around the United States. Undergraduates have stayed involved in the "care and feeding" of MoNA, as well, and MoNA collaborators meet regularly by video conference to discuss science and technology issues associated with the array. The task of moving MoNA, a small portion of which is shown in this time-lapse video (available on YouTube) entailed careful reassembly of the individual detector modules and reconnection of more than 1,000 cables that feed data from the detector to NSCL computers.