Progress Report - June 24, to July 30, 1999

Accomplishments / Status

Summary: The Restart Review was successfully held on July 20-21. The agenda, Review Committee Charge, and viewgraphs of the complete presentation may be viewed on the GNIRS web page under Meetings/Reviews at <http://www.noao.edu/ets/gnirs/>. The only open items from the review are 1) a software plan, and 2) settle open items and additional costs with IGPO. The cost-to-complete of the GNIRS instrument was given as $3.9 million with delivery in June, 2002.

Next Milestone: Pre-Fab Review (February, 2000)

Optics: The optical design update has been completed. Additional design work will be done when optics from RMI are actually received and characterized. The RMI Optics order is planned to be restarted by the end of August ’99. We are planning to contract with II-VI for the Offner Secondary and Collimator mirrors. We have baselined glass as the substrate for the remaining flat mirrors, except for the Pick-Off mirror, for which we are considering using aluminum substrate replica technology.

Mechanical Design: The preliminary engineering design was terminated in June in favor of estimating the cost the GNIRS instrument and preparing for the Restart Review. The 3-D engineering model design remains to be completed for the Main Optics Bench Assembly, Wavefront Sensor Bench, and several subassemblies.

Mechanical Fabrication: Instrument component fabrication, except that needed to support prototype testing, is planned to start in January ‘00. The Test Dewar is complete, and characterization testing is in process. This testing will be completed before the test dewar is needed to support mechanism testing.

Cold Motor Qualification: The Phytron motor selected for use in GNIRS has been received, tested and returned to Phytron for modification to increase bearing clearance. Phytron will test the motor at 60K before returning it. The larger Phytron motors used in the NIRI instrument are being held as backup to this preferred smaller motor. Cold motor testing should be complete in September.

Electronics Design: Electronics systems information is installed on the web site and may be viewed at <ftp://ftp.noao.edu/gnirs/elect>

Software Development: There will be two sets of software written for the GNIRS project: Engineering Test Software and the actual System Software. The requirements SDN for the Engineering Test Software has been written and is posted as an SDN on the Web site. This code will be written entirely in C and will be used to test and run the instrument until the deliverable System Software comes on line. It is planned that the Engineering Test software will interface with, and become part of, the System Software.
 

Problems / Solutions

Software Engineer: An individual experienced in EPICS needs to be identified and assigned to the project by March of 2000. In the interim, a C Programmer needs to be identified to write the Engineering Test Software.
 

Key Personnel

Brooke Gregory, Co-Project Scientist, will be returning to CTIO on July 23. He will remain in contact with the GNIRS project and will be acting in a consulting and review capacity.

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