Week 3 Post 1

After contacting Sujoy, the Harvard geochemist whom we needed to send the helium sample to, he mentioned to us that we needed to directly reduce the amount of gas we had. The 150 cc (cc= ml) metal canister had to much gas and was too much for his very sensitive RGA to test. He said we needed to reduce the amount by a factor of 3-4 in magnitude. That is a very small amount of gas to trap using canisters. Geoffrey thought of the clever idea to trap this small amount of gas in between the copper lines instead of trying to reduce the pressure in the 150cc canister. This also meant we had to carefully purge the copper lines we wanted to send and also valve off the ends with the best valves we could find to reduce any sort of leakage. Because we had to wait for a response planning this procedure took us to the middle of the week.