Ricky Chau

And I will show them the data and show them the impact.

This is data we took.

This is how headquarters received it.

This is the result of this measurement.

And when you tell those guys that your measurements prove that the PU behaved properly, you see it in their eyes.

Other questions like temperature, that's a much harder question.

That's been a holy grail for the shock physics community.

Not even just plutonium, it's almost anything.

Shocking anything and trying to measure accurate temperature.

We've had to develop new street cameras that are coupled with spectrometers, infrared detectors for lower temperatures.

So the needs of the experiment drive the development of diagnostics.

It came online in the early 2000s.

We were in the middle of obtaining the data on the various materials.

How Jasper fits in now versus then is that once you've created the capability, other problems pop up.

And then Jasper was the right facility to answer these questions.

So the first one that was outside the original Jasper program was an idea that's still with us today is the idea of what happens when your plutonium gets old?

Does it behave the same?

And Neil Holmes says, well, we have this Jasper facility that we're getting very high accuracy.

We can do an experiment that we can compare new and old plutonium.

And that was the first branching off point.