Hi Shawn,
I think you are referring to the pictures of the equipment we used to work on the CHARM rocket, right? I'm not quite sure which specific "machine" you are curious about, but I'll do my best to answer.
Physics departments at large, research universities like the University of Iowa often have a machine shop to help the scientists and professors who work there build equipment for their experiments. Parts for the particle detectors on the rocket were made right here in our machine shop. One of the pictures in the blog shows Mike Fountain from our shop standing next to one of the big milling machines he uses to make things for people in our department. It's so big the whole mill wouldn't fit in the picture! The NASA Wallops Flight Facility also has a big machine shop, where they build parts for the rockets like the nose cone and skin. You can read about their machine shop here:
http://www.nasa.gov/cente...out/fabrication.html In one of the other pictures, our student Mike Larson is standing next to a bell jar, which is a type of vacuum chamber. The bell jar is on pulleys, so we can raise and lower it to put things inside. Mike used the bell jar to put the black coating on the top hats, which is why it looks kind of dirty. The coating on the top hats is made from copper, but it is not orange and shiney like a penny. By controlling the air pressure inside the bell jar very carefully, Mike can use tiny molten copper beads to cover the inside of the top hats with a black coating that helps keep light out of the detectors.
If you are referring to the big, stainless steel thing on a blue stand (looks a bit like a mini submarine) that I'm next to in one of the photos, that's a vacuum chamber. Without this piece of equipment, we wouldn't be able to calibrate the detectors. Just below the vacuum chamber on the blue stand, is something that looks a bit like a fan or a turbine with a clear hose coming out the top. This is the scroll pump we use to start pumping the air out of the chamber. The big beige box sitting behind the scroll pump is the compressor (basically a very specialized refrigerator) for our cryopump. The cyropump removes the gases from the chamber by condensing them on a very cold surface. The cryopump helps us get more air out of the vacuum chamber than we could with just the scroll pump. The big grey rack of equipment on the other side of this photo has all of the power supplies for the electronics and particle detectors in the vacuum chamber. The three cream-colored pieces of equipment at the top of the grey rack are the high-voltage power supplies we use for the detectors and the electron source. They can go up to a few thousand volts.
I hope this helps! I'll try to put some more labels on the pictures if I have time.
Kris