Things are progressing in many ways better than expected, though we're still struggling to get to the point of doing science.

By the start of the second day, we had the sample in the diffractometer, and everything was aligned. The surface was even "kind of" located. Not bad for doing an experiment at a place where such kinds of experiments are not common.

This afternoon we made the first attempt at in-situ heating our sample. It both worked and didn't work. It worked in that things got hot. It didn't work in that I ended up melting the grounding wire. Without a grounding wire a charge will build up on the sample from the x-rays ionizing the metal atoms. A charged sample is a bad sample, hence the grounding wire.

After some discussion about how best to fix it, we settled on wrapping a small Pt wire around the sample and its pedestal. The wire then connects onto the rotation stage. This took an hour to do and a few more hours to re position the sample from the effort.