The WIYN Project, the entity formed to construct and commission the WIYN Observatory, continues to slowly complete its formal responsibilities. Since the last Newsletter, the Project has conducted an Operations Readiness Review (ORR), has made further progress towards completing the Instrument Adaptor Subsystem (IAS), and continues to organize for a formal conclusion.
The WIYN Operations Readiness Review (ORR) was held on 1-3 February 1996. In summary, the ORR panel recommended that the Observatory be accepted as completed except for certain IAS related items, as discussed further below. The panel established a list of priorities for the operations staff to address as soon as possible. The top priorities included improving telescope hardware safety limits and interlocks in certain key areas, acquiring more spares for certain critical control system items, improving Hydra fiber position accuracy, improving computer interaction reliability, and completing the telescope temperature-focus correction feedback mechanism. Most of these items have been completed or are being actively addressed. A prioritized list of longer term improvement projects, in such areas as telescope pointing and main axis servo performance, was also generated by the panel and assigned to the operations staff. A full ORR report is available to interested readers from Dave Silva (dsilva@noao.edu).
As a result of the ORR, a expanded list of IAS completion tasks was created. These items include completion and installation of the comparison lamp assembly (since accomplished), commissioning of the wavefront sensing camera, installation and commissioning of the atmospheric dispersion corrector, implementation of a more efficient active optics update process, improvement in guide probe motion speed and reliability, and implementation of a closed-loop optically driven focus compensation process. All these tasks are either being actively worked on or scheduled. Our goal is to complete all these tasks by 1 September 1996.
Remaining Project close-out activities include organizing and storing Project documentation, writing miscellaneous final reports, and closing out the financial books. These tasks should be formally completed by mid-summer 1996, subject to the review and approval of the WIYN Scientific Advisory Committee.
Dave Silva