After much work, coordination, and patience, the summit of Haleakala has been reenergized since the fire forced them to cut power. It’s always nice to reconnect and find healthy instruments, ready to do science!
The bad news is we won’t be doing any observing tonight, given the weather. Oh well.
At least it’s a beautiful night at RFO!
We lost power to the summit of Haleakala at approximately 9am Pacific, when Maui Fire Dept requested de-energization to prevent further ignitions and risk to personnel. They’re currently projecting power to remain off through Saturday night.
Thus far, no injuries and structural damages were due to the fire, which is located at around the 7,000-foot elevation level. Four engines, three wildland engines, 11 tankers, five dozers, two helicopters, an Maui Fire Department crew and a 27-person state Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Forestry and Wildlife’s wildland crew were utilized to battle the fire on Thursday. Crater Road remained closed at last report. The Summit District of Haleakalā National Park remains closed until further notice.
We thank all those involved in protecting life and property, as well as observatory efforts to work with first responders and get us back online as soon as possible.
For more information, please see Maui Now or other news sources.
We lost power at the summit of Haleakala today. Looks like planned electrical work, as it was from roughly 9am to 5pm Hawaiian time. I know MECO/Hawaiian Electric has some infrastructure upgrades to do, so this is a Good Thing if it means we avoid more multi-week outages in the future when big storms hit.
Our UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply–a fancy battery) kept us running for almost two hours before giving out. That’s slightly under the predicted runtime, but still solid performance I’m happy to see.
Unfortunately, the network upstream from us isn’t battery backed, so there’s nothing we can do remotely when these happen. We just have to let the software execute the automatic failsafe, then check that everything is ok when it comes back online.
In a weather update, this winter has been the worst for observing since we started. Normally winter is one of our best times: a lot of long dark nights with low humidity. This winter has not been that, at either observatory. We did start getting some good–and even simultaneously good–nights in the past couple weeks. Fingers crossed for more clear skies!
Every year, now for the past 3 years, there’s a giant wind/ice storm that knocks power and connectivity out at the summit of Haleakala. This year, it started over a week ago, and we’ve just regained connectivity to the instruments. Hooray!
Fingers crossed we’re done for this year and that the infrastructure improvements they’re doing make next year even shorter or a non-event.
We were actually observing when the power went out, but our multiple levels of safeguards obviously did their job. As you can see, the cameras are in fine working order.
It sure would be nice if the moon weren’t so bright, though! Even outside of the field of view, the two bright semi-circles in the bottom half of the images are scattered light from it.
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.
If you’ve been reading the news recently, it won’t surprise you to hear that our instruments on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, have been offline for the past couple days.
The good news is they came back online this afternoon, and seem to be in great shape. In fact, I would assess-timate the high winds even did a good job cleaning the windows.
Of course, that’s the easy part of this post. Our knowledge of the enormity of the tragedy from the fires on Maui grows day over day, and wrenches our hearts ever harder. People, businesses, history, nature, all gone and without warning.
Personally, I haven’t heard from everyone I know there, but each one I do hear from is a gift. It reminds me all too much of the firestorms that struck California in recent years–not “just” a fire, but a fast-moving “natural” blowtorch that creates its own weather as it decimates everything in its path. I keep thinking about a sign that hangs in my mother-in-law’s house, and she was kind enough to take a picture of it for me.
If there’s anything you can do to help the wonderful people of Maui recover, now or in the future, I hope you’ll act on that opportunity. The best resource I could find on ways to help was here.
All the life we know of clings to the thin skin of a giant rock flying through space. I think we should take care of each other.
It seems things are slowly returning to normal on Haleakala. The power has been more stable <knocks on wood> and this is the second night in a row of those gorgeous clear skies. We’ve got a lot of observing time to make up!
We’ve also got an exciting announcement coming up about data from Maui. More on that soon!
No less than 75 days after a large storm hit Maui, we heard from the instruments on Haleakala today!
The storm knocked out both power and fiber to the summit and it’s been a long and bumpy road getting power and connectivity back. The turmoil caused all sorts of secondary damage: breakers, generators, routers–all had to be replaced as problems were discovered sequentially. Sometimes temporary repairs had to be undone and redone. Sometimes replaced components had to be replaced again. We’re very grateful to the tenacity of the IfA team, as well as the workers at MECO and Hawaiian Telecom.
As you can perhaps read from the graphs, tonight the humidity was 100%, a strong indication you won’t be seeing any stars. But, as a system test, we observed anyways for a short period and–happily–everything performed as expected. Unfortunately, utility power was lost again, near 10pm local time.
We were only online for a handful of hours, but it’s so nice to know that, after a 2.5 month sabbatical and torrential ice storm, everything is still in great shape! Fingers crossed for more stable power from here on out, and getting back to the science!
We lost power at RFO from about 8am to 5pm today. Everything came back online as expected, however, and we’re observing now.
Not a packet yet from IfA. They found the problem, though: the network was damaged in our building. Physical repair completed, and (eagerly) awaiting reconfiguration to bring us back online.
It’s the best night we’ve had at RFO in at least a month. Lots of stars, clear, not too much moisture, few to no clouds. 🔭 Hooray!
At IfA, however, the saga continues. Power had been “restored” via generator, then the main network cable was fixed… and re-fixed. Then we lost power from the generator, had to replace a major breaker after ordering a replacement from off the island, and now mains power and generator are both up.
As you might have concluded by now, there was a lot of damage to the equipment on the mountain from the storm in December. It’s not clear what was from direct storm damage, power fluctuations, or other secondary causes, but clearly there’s still more to repair because… we still haven’t been able to reach the instruments, despite general connectivity being restored for a third time this month.
My hope is and endeavor will be that this is the last post about what’s not working, and the next one has only good news. Next week? Fingers crossed. Stay tuned and thanks for thinking good thoughts for us!