And… it works!

Recently, Marc helped a user run some crystals which the user had arranged to have grown in zero-gravity. Here are pictures of the crystal capillaries mounted at the beamline, and the raster grid used to locate crystals within a capillary.

Here it is at beamline 5.0.2, unpacked from the wooden crate, but not unpacked from its case yet. Install and commissioning in the beamline will begin in just a few weeks!

Sadly, today was Charlie Eigenbrot’s last PRT meeting, since he is retiring from Genentech in June. We will miss him! (But we do hope we comes back to visit us periodically at the synchrotron)

We are very fortunate to have an outstanding Scientific Advisory Board for the new beamline (“Gemini”) we are building in sector 2 at the ALS. The board members are: Bob Fischetti (APS), Dan Harrington (SSRL), Gwyndaf Evans (Diamond Light Source) and Dan Harrington (SSRL). All of the committee members have extensive experience in building microfocus…

Our second User Forum was on March 4, in which we discussed the purchase of a pixel-array detector for beamline 5.0.2. The exciting news since then is that we will be able to purchase a Pilatus 6M for the beamline. Expected delivery is in September of this year.

The third User Forum was on April 2, in which we discussed the diode-beamstop device which the BCSB is developing (allows measurement of flux during data collection), as well as the MiniKappa interlocks on beamline 5.0.2, which will now allow a full 360 rotation of omega (sometimes called Phi) with a maximum kappa angle of 55 degrees.