Subject: HRI-SIM TV2 Flash report Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 00:18:20 -0400 From: Dennis Wellnitz Hi all, First of all, I would like to apologize for the possibility that you may have received several copies of yesterday's Flash report, and that some of those may have been greatly delayed from the time of sending (which was 9:15 pm MDT). Ball was having difficulties with its e-mail systems, which caused delayed mail, multiple copies of single mail messages, and some lost mail. If you did not receive yesterday's Flash report and would like a copy, please send me an e-mail. Today (Thursday, August 19), we met at 9:00 am MDT to plan the day's activities. The meeting went on for about an hour as we discussed the various problems we had seen and possible ways of addressing them during the remaining testing time. We then re-located to FT-1 and began the day's calibration activities. Our first efforts were directed towards determining the focus positions of the telescope for the CCD and for the IR slit, using 50 micrometer pinholes. We accumulated sufficient data to solve for the focus positions, and the difference between the two, and expect to analyze this data in more detail tomorrow. By noon we had reached stable operation at the new bench temperature of 130 K, the "cold" temperature for this run, and soon thereafter began IR spectrometer calibration activities that require stability at that temperature. This "cold" temperature is higher than the one for TV1 (for which "cold" was 128 K) because we have greater parasitic heat loads due to the installation of the CCD and the mechanisms (the filter wheel and shutter). As we have done at the other bench temperatures, we will measure the additional heat needed to maintain this temperature to verify the thermal model. We next performed the first tests that required stability at the "cold" bench temperature, which were Argon and Krypton lamps for spectral registration and dispersion over the entire detector. Then we commenced the JPL black body tests, but soon ran into difficulties with the ITOC: many corrupt images. The method recommended to fix this problem is shutting down the instrument and the ITOC and then re-starting everything, which generally takes a bit more than an hour. Because we were only 1.5 hours away from our planned shut-down time, we decided to stop a bit early tonight, and continue tomorrow with the calibration work at this bench temperature. At this point it appears that we will be hard-pressed to finish all the desired work Friday night, and therefore will likely have some work left to be done on Saturday. Also today, we received confirmation from EM CCD tests that our proposed changes in patchable constants generally provide images with the desired numbers and types of overscans in rows and columns in the various implemented CCD modes, verifying our understanding of the overscan implementation problems. There are a couple of exceptions in specific modes that we are still tracking down, with hope of verifying those tomorrow. 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