Destroying LOFAR — Post Mortem

With the HBA cleared, we can start to analyse what caused the tile to fail and in what way that failure propagated through the structure.

Looking at the split-point in the tile. The cover was not damaged at all.

Here we've peeled back the cover to reveal the
end column. Cell 11 is split down the middle.

Removing half of the lid shows the destruction inside.

The complete mess inside Cell 11.

With the shards removed from the cell content,
the failure of the cell walls can clearly be seen.

A full catalogue of damages was made, along with hundreds of photographs. Although the analysis of the tile failure is mostly a curiosity for the already-deployed LOFAR network, this is a crucial learning opportunity for the proposed EISCAT_3D system.