In the previous week the HET Board of Directors met and were generally happy with the progress being made on the HET. They are very eager for science operations to begin and have authorized the start of Early Science Operations starting July 1st. This will mean that HET member institutions will be able to submit requests to their local Telescope Allocation Committee in the coming weeks. The amount of time available will grow with time but is likely to start with 1 week per dark period. The instrument that will be available for Early Science Operations will be the new Low Resolution Spectrograph (LRS2).

In this week the HET continued with VIRUS commissioning during bright time with the addition of 7 new VIRUS units. This brings the number of spectrographs units (and IFUs) to 16. We will use these during commissioning in the coming dark run but we can already see that several of them will need some further engineering while others are very good.

The mirror team continues to swap mirrors into the array this week they swapped out 4 mirrors. The array now has an average coating age of 454 days with a swap rate of 1.7 segments/week.