Maintenance Week

We didn’t get as much time on the sky this week than normal, as we had work going on at both observatories, RFO and IfA. One was planned, the other not so much.

At IfA, our maintenance was unplanned. IFA2’s sunshade stopped working, which is scary because the sunshade protects from the Sun potentially damaging the shutter on the FLI science cameras. You can see the problem below, using our internal “PiCam”: the polycarbonate gear started to slip around the motor shaft.

We recent started a project to detect the the sunshade position using computer vision to catch exactly this sort of problem automatically but, since we currently check every morning, we caught it manually. Fortunately, Team LaserSETI member Doug Hagan who’s local on Maui, was able to make the long drive up Haleakala and close it by hand.

Speaking of cameras, the horz-cam on IFA1 had started misbehaving transiently. We tried remote diagnostics and troubleshooting but eventually we had to admit it wasn’t succeeding. So we’ve sent a new camera (and a new gear) to Doug, and he’ll be replacing both shortly.

Meanwhile, at RFO in California, they’re upgrading the roof surface of the observatory which our instruments sit directly on top of. We worked with observatory team to come up with a plan for them to coat the the whole roof without disturbing the position of the instruments.