While working on the alignment of the corrector at UA, out team found that the coating on M4 (and a few of the witness samples that came with it) was beginning to have signs of coating failure, bubbling and spotting. Our current plan is to send the witness samples to McDonald so that we can confirm the stripping process for this very tough coating and then send that witness back to UA so that they can confirm that the witness has not been damaged. Meanwhile UA will continue to work on the corrector alignment with M4. If all goes well we will then strip the coating from M4 and send it to be recoated once they have all alignment issues worked out. The question remains about who will do the recoating.

We hope to act quickly and get M4 back to UA for final alignment before shipping to McDonald in the spring.

So far this does not pose an imminent threat to the WFU schedule.