My dad is a thermal dynamics engineer at Lockheed Martin. He helped design the Dewar for the payload. The Dewar is a giant thermos containing enough liquid helium to keep the satellite's sensitive instruments cooled to below 4 degrees kelvin for the duration of the experiment (1 year).
The team had a bet going on how long the satellite would be able to record meaningful data while in orbit. He won the pool after guessing correctly to within +- 24 hours on the year-long mission. This is my dad on the left :
Like jmillikin says, the science team collected terabytes of data and ran over several deadlines to report their findings. The precision required for the experiment is really quite phenomenal. Measuring discrepancies in gyroscopic alignment to within the 4 marcsec/yr is not trivial.
http://einstein.stanford.edu/gallery/dewar/dewar_lift.jpg
The team had a bet going on how long the satellite would be able to record meaningful data while in orbit. He won the pool after guessing correctly to within +- 24 hours on the year-long mission. This is my dad on the left :
http://einstein.stanford.edu/Library/images/He_dep-MOC-1.jpg
Like jmillikin says, the science team collected terabytes of data and ran over several deadlines to report their findings. The precision required for the experiment is really quite phenomenal. Measuring discrepancies in gyroscopic alignment to within the 4 marcsec/yr is not trivial.