The biggest change the occurred this week was the completion of the HPF enclosure. A team came out from Penn State to lead the efforts and after two days the enclosure was completed and the last day was spent wiring up temperature sensors to monitor how the systems reacts to seasonal changes in the HET basement.

Newly installed HPF enclosure next to the HRS enclosure.

Our electrical team completed hook up of power cables to distribution boxes in Virus annex this week. They hoisted and installed the Virus equipment rack in the annex as well. We hope to have all of the electrical work done for the first enclosure by the end of next week when a programmer comes from Austin work work on the PLCs.

This week we found a problem with loose screws on lower X. We shut the tracker down for the week and an engineer came out from Austin to inspect the system for any damage. He found that many of the screws were loose and some of the shims were missing. This was likely caused by a fairly strong vibration incident that we had when we were commissioning the TCS timing loops. The engineers and mechanical team got the X drive shimmed and aligned again and all of the crews have been tightened down with torque wrenches. While the engineer was out here he worked on the rho stage which was hitting the proximity sensors early due to the non-flatness of the switch plate. They re-installed it with shims to adjust flatness and installed RHO limit switches and set the clearance.

The initial commissioning of the Strip and Wash Room began this week. A mirror segment was put through the new ultra-pure water cleaning. It is not entirely surprising that a number of small leaks were found around the mirror and passage way doors. The rest of the week was spent finding leaks and diverting water drainage paths. Our electrical engineer has nearly completed the PID controller and pressure display that will show when the room is in positive pressure and negative pressure.

As an interesting diversion this week we had the Director on site with several photographers taking pictures of him and the facility. Some of the shots were done from a helicopter while others were done from various catwalks or man-lifts. We all look forward to seeing these glamour shots.

The in-line fans for the K-hut and Strip and Wash room are now in place and working. This means that we can begin the process of commissioning the strip and Wash room. At the moment we still need a few more safety indicators on if the room has negative or positive pressure and to get the hot and cold water nozzles in place. This work seems to be moving forward at a good pace.

The replacement of the old truss sensors is moving forward. As mentioned before the old sensors have been removed and the new ones are being assembled.

Lift 3rd VSS platform into place, test fit, secured in place in prep for install.
Moved upper VSS platform into bay area, painted modified area and moved onto dome floor.
Work around the VIRUS Support Structure (VSS) continues. We have made some modifications to the work platforms and three of those have been test fit, secured in place and in preparation for the installation in two weeks. This week we did some work on possible coupling between the VSS and the structure. Our concern was that wind shake on the VSS would cause the mirrors to move. We did a number of test at the CCAS tower involving people physically moving the currently empty VSS enclosures. The concern seems to be warranted as the FWHM of the induced movement is about a quarter of an arc-second. We will look into identifying the members that cause the most coupling between the two and mitigate the motion.

The software team out here has been working on the DMI and Tip/Tilt to get it realigned with the new mount models that were installed last week.

The big news this week is the arrival of the HPF enclosure. Despite some very thick fog and misty rain we were able to get the truck unloaded and placed in the spectrograph room without tearing up the newly prepared floor. The PSU assembly team will arrive late next week.

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.

It has been slightly slow going with the new track electronics. We have found that some communications are flaky (bad mil-spec connections) and many of the motors require significant retuning. The PFIP test mass is in place but we want to make sure we have all motions largely tuned and reliable before we pull down the test mass and replace it with the hexapod assembly and the PFIP frame.

We have had several pieces of bad new from the University of Arizona group who are assembling the HET corrector. At the moment we have had a slip in the delivery date of three weeks and may see further slips in the near future depending upon the nature of the problems they have encountered.

Later this week the HPF team from Penn State will arrive and will be shipping out the last of the MRS and FIF components and assembling the calibration enclosure for the HPF.

Last week week we finished clearing out the optics tables and floor for the MRS decommissioning. We also met with the HZPF team to discuss their preliminary plan for their new enclosure in the spectrograph room. Much of the staff were preoccupied with finishing preparation for the tracker lift. The crane arrived late on Friday afternoon (3 days early).

This week the Crane Services will setup for their work on Monday and will take out the lower and upper X rails that were used for shipping. We are now done with them (since the lower and upper X components are assembled and working on the telescope). On Tuesday the tracker should arrive from Austin in the morning and if the weather cooperates Crane Services will lift it into place. We expect that this will take much of the day. We hope it does not take longer because the winds are predicted to rise on Wednesday and peak at “Destructive Winds” on Thursday. Once the tracker bridge is in place we will begin cabling it and start testing moves over the next weeks.