In the past week the HPF team from Penn State came out to remove the last components of the MRS and install the calibration enclosure for the HPF. This work went well and their enclosure is now in place. They have approved the floor paint which will go below the HPF main enclosure when they bring it out in late 2014 or early 2015.

We also made a jump forward with the mirror Strip And Wash (SAW) room. This room is connected to the mirror coating chamber and now we can do a final ZrO strip of the surface and a ultra pure water rinse and take it directly into the coating room without leaving a clean room area. This SAW room is now being used in a very manual mode and we hope to automate some components in the future.

This past week we made some small improvements in the tracker performance but we continue to have problems with the encoder. We will continue to work on this problem this week.

This week may be a little slower until we can get the problems with the tracker fixed. This will give the operations support team a chance to catch up with maintenance issues and make progress on other projects like the mirror washing room.

We also may have some contractors for Veliz Construction on site to begin the process of aluminum taping of the control building roof. This will reduce its emissivity and should help it from super-cooling at night and sending cold air into the dome. Unfortunately for Veliz the wind does not look like it will give them much of a break to actually get the work done.