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"Comminciamo a rullare, eh?" by Judy Jackson
Today's the day SVX hits the road. The stiff pink package, made of housing insulation, holds the Silicon Vertex Detector for the Collider Detector at Fermilab. The SVX represents five intense years of painstaking, intricate work by a dedicated cadre of incredibly skilled technicians, engineers and physicists. Scores of nights and weekends are wrapped up inside that peppermint pink Owens-Corning insulation. Depending on how you add it up, the SVX has cost upwards of 20 million dollars, or a hundred thousand dollars a pound, give or take. No one wants to drop it. In the parking lot outside waits a flatbed truck. Fermilab rigger Mike Mascione sits at the controls of a 15-ton crane, waiting to lift the SVX from its trolley onto the truck as soon as it emerges from the building.
"Cominciamo a rullare, eh?" he calls to Francesco Palmonari, who is choreographing the outdoor phase of the operation.
"Let's roll."
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last modified 2/2/2001 email Fermilab |
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