Two weeks ago we had a fairly serious tracker issue. While recovering from a fairly typical tracker failure, the telescope operator requested that the breaks be set but instead the tracker moved in X and generated a hard skew. This hard skew actually caused the bearing to come out of the bearing block. This occurred the day that the blogger and most of the chief engineers were going to their summer conferences. Upon the return the engineers were able to determine that no permanent damage was done to the bearings or the tracker in general. The engineering team was able to move the tracker back into the block using the tracker motors. Unfortunately, the software issues that led to the skew are still present and have not yet been sorted out. This has severely limited our ability to run trajectories for engineering or the start of early science operations.

In the mean time work continues on VIRUS enclosure 2 and with re-coating of the primary mirror segments.