Blog – Page 164 – Extreme Wavefront Control Lab

Unpacking Day 5: Our Shell Survived!

Another eventful day for MagAO. The big news is that we unpacked and inspected the shell, and it is in one piece. The delicate unpacking procedure took most of the day.

Lid Off — The process started with carefully removing the lid from the inner box.

Packed Flying Mirror — The mirror still in its shipping frame after being lifted from the inner box.

The moment of truth:

An Intact Shell — No cracks! Our 1.6 mm thick, 85cm diameter thin shell mirror survived shipping from Florence, Italy to Las Campanas, Chile.

Here’s a longer version of the last few minutes of unpacking, featuring the smooth stylings of Armando Riccardi and the mirror handling team:

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of other stuff was happening. In addition to completing the guider work we also setup the ASM cooling circuit.

filling_the_bucket — Don't worry, the project isn't on fire yet, we're just filling the heat sink. Yes, that is one of our shipping crates.

victor_cooling — Victor declares victory. The pump circulates water through the ASM and the big tub.

the_fountain — Povilas and Tyson made us a nice water fountain. This isn't just for the ambiance. Consider that the specific heat of liquid water is 4.2 kJ/kg, the latent heat of fusion (melting ice) is 334 kJ/kg, and the latent heat of vaporization is 2257 kJ/kg. And we're in the Atacama desert.

marco_bench — After dinner we started preparing the flipping bench. Marco Xompero is making some adjusments.

group_photo — A group photo at breakfast. From lower left: Laird Close, Frederico Piccin, Alan Uomoto, Mario Andrighettoni , Marco Xompero, Victor Gasho, Jared Males, and Armando Riccardi (missing Richard and Tyson, who had already gone up to get ready for unpacking).

rec_room — In case we take a day off, there's a nice rec room here. Juan's band has taken over the ping pong table for guitar storage though.

marco_lifts — Marco gets ready for unpacking.

Guider Demo

Alan and Tyson finished testing our newly installed guider this morning. Here’s a quick demo of the probe moving out of the way, as it would after collimating the telescope.

Alan and Tyson Through The Guider — Alan Uomoto and Tyson Hare surveying their handiwork.

Unpacking Day 4: Clocked Holes

More progress at LCO today. The ASM unit was unpacked and moved into the cleanroom, the mount ring was attached to the ASM handling cart, the finishing touches were placed on our guider, assorted other odds and ends got checked off, and the Arcetri component of our team arrived. Now on with the show:

removing_asm_cover — Mario and Richard removing the shipping cover from the ASM.

The PI is working — Laird is de-burring one of our ASM feet, and Richard is vacuuming another one.

Working on the cart — A few modifications were necessary to finalize the ASM handling cart. Miguel, Juan, Tyson, and Victor are adjusting the gear box.

Tyson on the cart — Tyson Hare working on the ASM handling cart. It's his baby.

prepping_asm — Mario, Richard, and Povilas preparing to move the ASM

underside — Mario inspecting the ASM reference body. It looks great.

asm_moved — At the end of the day the ASM was moved into the clean room for safe keeping. All work on it will be done here from now on.

This video shows the ASM being moved into the clean room.

new_bulkhead — This is our new cable bulkhead, being test fitted on the NAS. All of our cooling hoses and electrical and communication cabling will route through this plate.

We hit another snag today. Our “wedge plate”, which is part of the mounting system which holds the ASM on the telescope, was found to have been made with a set of holes clocked by about 60 degrees. This is an easy thing to fix – we’ll drill new holes tomorrow.

Discussing the wedge — Shortly after discovering the clocked holes in the wedge plate, the MagAO team spontaneously formed committees and began problem solving.

armando_marco — Armando Riccardi and Marco Xompero arrived today from Firenze, It. They are here to help us with our thin shell and handling the ASM. They're the world's best, so we're in good hands.

lco_view — Here is our daily shot of LCO itself. Center frame is the dorm complex, where astronomers and staff sleep, eat, workout, do laundry, etc. In the foreground, the left hand rooftop is the cleanroom where MagAO is hard at work. At right is the Astronomer Support Building, which among other things contains the nearest coffee pot.

Unpacking Day 3: The Team Gets Bigger

Another eventful day here at Las Campanas. Some more of the team arrived: Richard Sosa from Steward, Tyson Hare from Carnegie (Pasadena) and Mario Andrighettoni and Frederico Piccin from Microgate (Bolzano Italy). We unpacked the flipping bench, and even more exciting was the first mounting of our 4 electronics boxes on the NAS ring. This also led to our first glitch. After dinner we started unpacking the ASM unit itself. As usual, here are some pictures of all the fun:

mounting_guider_box — Juan, Emilio, and Alan are mounting the guider box on the NAS. This box holds the control electronics for our guider.

The MagAO Hidden Mickey — The PI celebrates. The guider, driver, and CCD electronics boxes are safely mounted. See below for what happened to VisAO.

mario_asm — Mario and Frederico unpacking the ASM unit.

So we had our first glitch today. After mounting the VisAO box on the NAS, we noticed that a box bolted to the side (part of its liquid cooling system) would prevent the NAS from rotating to the vertical while on the transport cart. Even though this is only a problem when the system is off the telescope, we still need to fix it. The fix sounds simple: get a smaller box. As usual, it ain’t that easy. Removing the box meant almost completely gutting the VisAO electronics box. Fun.

visao_gutted — The VisAO box after being gutted. This was necessary to remove the offending cooling equipment.

jared_opinion — Jared about to express his opinion about something. This is a family blog, so I'll just say that having your advisor tell you to disassemble your PhD project makes for a rough evening.

At the end of the day, VisAO is all back together and working. We’ll mount it on the NAS tomorrow as soon as we get a chance. We also powered up the “Little Joe” CCD controllers today, and verified that they survived the trip. Things continue to go well.

Victor, Laird, Povilas, and Alan sitting down to steak and potatoes for lunch. The food here is great.

LCO is a beautiful place. This was tonight's sunset from outside the clean room. Our ASM mount ring shines in the foreground.

Unpacking Day 2

We kept at it on our 2nd day (our 1st full day). Today we unpacked the NAS, installed the guider in the NAS (for the first time), unpacked and tested our computers, and after dinner we unpacked and inspected the WFS. Some pix: