Subject: HRI-SIM TV2 Flash report Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 22:37:14 -0400 From: Dennis Wellnitz Hi all, Last night we were having so much fun taking black body data that we kept working until shortly after 10:30 pm MDT. Today (Tuesday), we convened at 9:00 am MDT to plan our work for the day. At that time we learned that there may be a simple solution for the CCD FPGA problem, which will be tested on hardware tomorrow morning. If that solution is proven by test, we may warm up the system after the conclusion of calibration at the current bench temperature (136 K) to hook up the CCD and also check the stimulator connections. The projected time from start of warm-up to resumption of calibration is about 4 days, which we expect to be roughly coincident with the weekend. But all of this is dependent on the solution being verified on the EM CCD operating cold in the lab dewar. Otherwise, we will simply continue on with calibration at the next SIM bench temperature. Don't change any travel plans yet! Essentially all of the calibration work today was continuing work with the JPL black body for derivation of flat-field corrections. This flat-field work is the most critical calibration effort because it is extremely difficult to do after launch. This work went very well, albeit slowly, because the black body takes at least 20 minutes to stabilize at each new temperature. We also ran a short test of the filter wheel, single-stepping it from one end of the range of motion to the other and mapping the output of the Hall sensors at every step, while monitoring the temperatures of the surrounding components. We expect to finish data taking for today at about 9:00 pm MDT. Tomorrow we plan to convene at 9:00 am MDT to review status and plan the work of the day. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions. If you would prefer not to receive these Flash reports on HRI-SIM TV2, please let me know. Dennis