| Late Summer, 2007 | WIYN Bench Spectragraph Upgrade |
| June, 2007 | WHIRC at WIYN Telescope |
Newfirm Achieves First Light
Newfirm was transported to the 4M Telescope on Kitt Peak in late January, 2007. It achieved first light the beginning of February. For a full report on this milestone, look at the Newfirm Web Page
Items of Interest
The NEWFIRM instrument is now up and running with four arrays. It remains in the flexure test rig at this time but is due to be fitted to the telescope in January 2007. Science verification will take place in several runs during Semester 2007A.
Currently there are four Orthogonal Transfer Array (OTA) devices in the dewar and are being tested in the lab.
MONSOON circuit board sets have been completed and delivery made to Fermilab for their system.
QUOTA Met First Light
QUOTA met first light for MONSOON on October 11. QUOTA is the prototype camera for WIYN’s One Degree Imager (ODI). Read the rest of the story in the latest edition of the NOAO/NSO Newsletter. There will be another QUOTA run in January 2007.
A complete article is in the “NOAO/NSO Newsletter” on page 25. The link target is:
http://www.noao.edu/noao/noaonews/dec06/pdf/88kpno.pdf
OTA Cell Image Achieved
New Hiring Underway
The MONSOON project is hiring two new electronics technicians, one based in La Serena and one in Tucson. The La Serena technician will work with Peter Moore and Ricardo Schmidt on circuit board testing, assembly of systems for delivery, and engineering developments needed for the Blanco Dark Energy Camera and WIYN One-Degree Imager projects. The Tucson technician will work with Dave Sawyer and Mark Hunten on testing of the WIYN QUOTA system and support of the IR version.
Spare Boards Shipped to Fermilab
A spare set of MONSOON boards, consisting of one Master Control Board, one Clock & Bias Board, and one CCD Acquisition board, were shipped to Fermilab to supplement their development system.
MONSOON System Shipped to Indiana University
A complete system of the MONSOON CCD controller was shipped to Indiana University. This system includes the Master Control Board, Clock & Bias Board, CCD Acquisition board, and all associated transition boards and fiber interfaces as well as a backplane, chassis and power supply. This system will be incorporated into the FHiRE instrument, Dr. Caty Pilachowski PI, under development for the WIYN telescope.
The MONSOON CCD controller before shipping to IU. This system includes, bottom-to-top, the Master Control Board, the Clock & Bias Board, and the CCD Acquisition Board. Three unused slots in the backplane are covered with blank covers.
Development Chassis Shipped to Barcelona
A MONSOON development chassis was shipped to Institut de Física d'Altes Energies in Barcelona. The IFAE is a participant in the Dark Energy Camera consortium. They will use this chassis to assess the reliability of the Systran fiber interface module and test the S-Link fiber interface scheme. This system includes the Master Control Board, Clock & Bias Board, CCD Acquisition board, and all associated transition boards and fiber interfaces as well as a backplane and chassis.
Partial MONSOON System Delivered to Tucson OTA Test Lab
A preliminary MONSOON system, consisting of a Master Control Board, a Clock & Bias Board and one CCD Acquisition board, as well as a backplane, chassis and power supply, was delivered to the WIYN lab in Tucson for early testing of control schemes for Orthogonal Transfer Array (OTA) CCDs. This system will be supplemented with additional CCD Acquisition Boards to allow testing of larger mosaics of OTA devices, when the additional boards are fully tested and verified.
MONSOON Systems Shipped to UIUC
Two MONSOON CCD systems, each consisting of a Master Control Board, a Clock & Bias Board, a CCD Acquisition Board, a backplane, chassis and all associated transition boards, were shipped to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. UIUC is one of the participants in the Dark Energy Camera consortium, and they will use these systems in their laboratory, in collaboration with the Fermilab group, to develop CCD test procedures, and to evaluate MONSOON technology for possible use in the Dark Energy Camera.
MONSOON System Delivered to CTIO Lab
A complete MONSOON CCD system was shipped to the detector testing laboratory at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. This system will support their collaborative involvement in MONSOON engineering development, including developments needed for the Dark Energy Camera project.
MONSOON System Shipped to Fermilab
A MONSOON CCD system, consisting of a Master Control Board, a Clock & Bias Board, a CCD Acquisition Board, a backplane and chassis, and all associated transition boards, were shipped to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab is one of the participants in the Dark Energy Camera consortium, and they will use these systems in their laboratory to develop CCD test procedures, and to evaluate MONSOON technology for possible use in the Dark Energy Camera.
The MONSOON CCD lab controller undergoing testing prior to shipment to Fermilab. The three boards, left-to-right, are the CCD Acquisition Board, the Clock & Bias Board, and the Master Control Board which includes the Systran fiber interface module. The laboratory power supplies (external, on the left) were for testing only.
MONSOON System Delivered to KPNO
A complete MONSOON CCD controller was delivered to the Kitt Peak National Observatory engineering staff this month. This system consists of the Master Control Board, Clock & Bias Board, CCD Acquisition Board, backplane and chassis, associated transition boards. The KPNO staff will use this system for training and familiarity, with a goal of integrating it into the WIYN Bench Spectrograph as part of a detector upgrade for that instrument.
MONSOON System Delivered to NEWFIRM Project
A complete MONSOON system for controlling the very large NEWFIRM focal plane was handed over to the NEWFIRM project this month. NEWFIRM (the NOAO Extremely Wide Field IR Imager) has a focal plane mosaic made up of four ORION arrays from Raytheon Vision Systems. Each ORION array provides 64 video channels of output for rapid readout of its 2048x2048 InSb pixels; the entire focal plane thus requires 256 video channels of connection with the MONSOON controller. The MONSOON system for NEWFIRM consists of two separate Pixel Acquisition Nodes (PANs), with each PAN made up of a backplane, a Master Control Board, a Clock & Bias Board, and four IR Acquisition Boards, along with all the associated transition boards. There is also a Supervisor program “above” the PANs which provides the essential coordination and image assembly for the unified focal plane.
The MONSOON IR controller for NEWFIRM. This chassis holds the Detector Head Electronics for both PANs needed to control the complete NEWFIRM 4096x4096 focal plane (256 video channels). A US quarter is shown for scale.
Interim MONSOON System Delivered to WHIRC Project
This month an interim MONSOON IR controller was delivered to the WHIRC project team. WHIRC is an IR science camera to go on the Tip-Tilt Module for the WIYN telescope. Its focal plane consists of a single Rockwell 2048x2048 pixel array made up of HgCdTe diodes. This is considered an interim shipment because it includes an older version of the IR Acquisition Board that will be replaced when a Board in the latest revision is available. The other boards – Master Control, and Clock & Bias – are the latest versions. This interim system is being supplied now to help the WHIRC team become familiar with the MONSOON controller and experiment with its use on their engineering grade detector.
MONSOON System Installed on NOAO IR Detector Test Dewar
A MONSOON IR controller was delivered to the NOAO IR Detector Test lab this month. This controller will be used for testing of ORION arrays developed by Raytheon Vision Systems under the foundry run agreement to build detectors for the NEWFIRM instrument. This controller consists of the Master Control Board, the Clock & Bias Board, and two IR Acquisition Boards to support the 64 channels of video output on the ORION controller. It also includes the Linux-based computer for running the Pixel Acquisition Node (PAN) software. Early tests on arrays previously tested with other controllers demonstrate that this MONSOON system is providing detector-noise-limited performance, while supporting the high channel count needed to read the entire ORION array simultaneously.
The laboratory MONSOON IR controller connected to the “Mean Green Machine” IR detector test dewar. The box isn’t pretty, but the MONSOON system inside delivers detector-limited performance and rapid readout of the complete ORION array.
November 14th, 2004 MONSOON Open Source Licensing Approved and in Effect AURA and NOAO are proud to announce the release of the MONSOON technology under the umbrella of 'Open Source Licensing'. This has been a long sought after decision that we feel will allow the technology to advance in the common interests of, and be more readily adopted by, observatories requiring a Detector Image Acquisition System to meet future focal plane requirements. We invite you to become a 'Friends of MONSOON' community member and urge you to investigate the possibilities that MONSOON technology will provide for you. This accomplishment has been possible thanks to the hard work put in by NOAO Directorship, Major Instrumentation leadership and the MONSOON development group The MONSOON Development Program is funded by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (“NOAO”), which is operated for the National Science Foundation (“NSF”) by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (“AURA”) under Cooperative Agreement No. AST-0132798.
For those who are interested, or for people who need more convincing , additional resources concerning Open Source issues are available at http://opensource.org
To read the license agreement and gain access to the MONSOON Technical Archive, please click here
July 14th, 2004
Orion II bare MUX read out with the MONSOON Image Acquisition System
Note: The detector reference columns can be seen in this image as well as 5 bad row-pairs.
To see a higher resolution image, please click here
MONSOON has read out an Orion II bare MUX in preparation for connecting the camera to a fully functional detector. The Orion II detector is a hybridized 2048 x 2048 InSb NIR detector with sensitivity out to 5um and 64 output channels. The tests conducted with the MONSOON Image Acqusition system are part of a lead up to the development of a 2 x 2 mosaic of these detectors to be employed by the NEWFIRM instrument. MONSOON will be used to characterize further ORION II developments and be the image acquisition system for NEWFIRM. This image was captured and readout in under 1/2 second with a system noise level below 10 e- rms. The current performance tests were performed with a warm mux while imaging an original orientation setup mask: RIO is now known as RVS.
September 29, 2003
Monsoon runs CCDs
September 19, 2003
News from CTIO
The mux was at ambient temperature, and in continuous reset when idle. A single image was taken, with the integration time set to zero. The effective integration time was app 3.4 seconds (the readout time). The readout is made from four channels, just like the ISPI detector. Reading from 32 channels (which is an option available for this device) requires designing a new board, which was out of the scope for this test.
August 8, 2003
Monsoon Achieves First Light
