We are continuing the acceptance and development tests on the telescope begun in July, 2000. This list of tasks involves things we must do in the lab in Nashville to be ready for trips to Arizona to work on the telescope. They mainly have to do with the spectrograph.

The work planned falls into four categories as follows:

1. MECHANICAL ADJUSTMENTS of the telescope and spectrograph.
1. Modify the float in oil reservoir to give it greater range (to allow for more leeway for oil slowly flowing back into the reservoir). (We did this on 1 Feb. on a working trip to the observatory. It was a very messy job.)
2. Finish getting the lenses for the spectrograph camera polished and delivered. (TORC was polishing these lenses in early 2002. As of 1 Feb., all but three were finished. By late March, TORC had finished all but two lenses, one a CaF2 element that is difficult to polish and a glass lens deliberately left unfinished to allow for variations from the original design. By April 19, TORC had finished polishing all the lenses but the final (pick-up) lens. They finished that lens in mid May and shipped it to the coater.)
3. Set up the contract with A. Schier for making the mechanical mount (barrel) for the spectrograph camera. (Busby began working on this in late January, got a revised quote from Schier in mid February, and finally got the contract establised by the middle of June. He had the lens mount redesigned and the drawings out to the machine shop by late June.)
4. Get the lenses for the spectrograph camera coated and delivered to Schier for mounting. (As of late March, we had sent one lens to the coating company. We got the lion's share of the lenses in late April, sent them off for coating in early May, and arranged for TORC to send the final lens in mid May. The coating was almost done by the end of June,)
5. Finish mounting the colimator/reimaging mirrors for the spectrograph and test their adjustments. (Eaton--We started this task in early November but have not made much progress on it. We had to design a special tool for compressing the springs in the positioning units to attach them; this was being made by Mark Wells as of late June. We thus decided to wait on mounting these mirrors until we get them coated.)
6. Mount the echelle grating in its stand. (We have constructed all the special tools to position the echelle grating and its pucks as of late June.)
7. Try to decide on what coating to use on the mirrors in the spectrograph and on the diagonal mirror in the instrument head. (As of late June, we had decided to use Clausing to coat these mirrors. We are still discussing with him which coating actually to use.)
8. Finish making the primary feed for the echelle spectrograph. (This requires a number of little jobs involving hand fitting of small parts.) (Eaton&Williamson)
9. Assemble the fiber-optic cables for coupling the spectrograph to the telescope. (We had assembled most of the materials to use by the end of June but had otherwise made minimal progress.)
10. Design and build extensions for the legs of the optical table for the spectrograph. Design the equipment for moving the optical table into the spectrograph enclosure at the observatory. Design the insulated box to surround the spectrograph in its enclosure. (We designed the leg extensions, procured the material for them in late January, had the legs welded up in late March, and installed them in the observatory in May. We started designing the tools for moving the table in January, ran some tests of the concept in late February, and started making them in May. We started designing the insulating box in mid February and finished designing it in May. We verified the availability of the insulation in a trip to the observatory.)
11. Finish putting the motors in the spare drive tractor for the telescope and test them. (We drilled and tapped four holes for attaching guides to the side of the tractor in mid January. We have designed an alignment jig to position the moters and will have Mark Wells make it in May. We finished assembling the tractor in mid June in time to take it out to the observatory in late June.)
12. Finish designing and building the tools for rotating the telescope back to its home position by brute force in case the oil bearings fail. Also design and build fixtures for lifting the telescope off its base for working on the oil bearings if ever required. (We made preliminary designs for some of this equipment in January and got Mark Wells to build some of it. We finished collecting the material for the first major tool in May and sent it to Wells in Mid June.)
2. ELECTRICAL WIRING.
1. Buy new motor and variable-speed controller for the oil pump. (Deferred indefinitely.)
2. Finish designing the air conditioning systems for the spectrograph i enclosure and control building. Buy the components and arrange with Lou Boyd to install them. (We made tests at the observatory in January to measure how heat flows through the enclosure to give us a better idea of how much heating and cooling we'll need for the enclosure. The enclosure seemed to take about 1000 BTUs per deg F of temperature rise. Because the heater we used for the tests had a thermostat, we are continuing these tests with a temperature logger left at the observatory. These tests suggest that, if we leave the CryoTiger in the room with the spectrograph, that room will stay above the desired temperature even in the winter. Busby will size the equipment i on the basis of the results of all these tests.)
3. Work on MIRRORS.
1. Get the secondary mirror for the telescope remade, coated, put into the telescope, and tested on star images. (We established our contract with Oak Ridge to make an aluminum replacement secondary by 10 January. As of 1 Feb, we have an optical prescription and have advised Oak Ridge about the dimensions for machining the blank. The blank was ready as of mid March, but we were delayed for about a month fretting about how best to stress relieve it. As of mid April, Oak Ridge had cut a preliminary surface before sending it out for stress relief and doing the final machining. Oak Ridge had sent the mirror out for stress relieving in the first week of May, got it back in mid May, and finished turning it by 16 May. We had it coated by Clausing in mid June and put it into the telescope in late June. The mirror worked quite well in initial tests.)
2. Finish polishing the spare folding mirror to the point that it could be aluminized and overcoated for use in the telescope. (Eaton began working on it with very fine-grit polishing paper in mid October and several times since with little success.)
4. Work on the DRIVES and CONTROL SYSTEM.
1. Improve the simulator for the telescope by cleaning up the code to make it easier to maintain, by getting the code for specifying specific observations to work, and by experimenting with other ways of assigning the priorities. Extend the simulator by writing a procedure to keep track of observations being made on longer timescales (days to months) and specifying nightly base priorities to get the right frequency of observations. (Our simulator was written by Allen Keel as a student project we have another student, Shawn Vaughns, maintaining and extending it. He has put in code for making the individual observations and, with the help of Melvin Poplar, has added plotting routines to show the progression of the telescope through the sky. We have also added code to schedule observations of specific stars at specific times, which will also go into the telescope control programs, and added code to make a record of the theoretical schedule for a give night for further statistical analysis.)
2. Decide on what information to log during operation of the telescope and write preliminary programs to extract information from the logs and display it. (We had pretty much decided on what information to log as of 1 Jan. and have a student Melvin Poplar working on extensions to the quality-control program that Eaton wrote this fall. He has written routines automatically to decompress logfiles if necessary, to plot the progression of the telescope in RA and Dec, and to display pictures of the field taken when the telescope failed to acquire a star. He will also write a procedure into the program for keeping a master log of the observations made for analysis of loading for various observing programs. This will pretty much finish the quality-control program until we get the spectrograph operating and decide what to log for it. Shawn Vaughns has started writing the statistical-analysis program as of late March. Poplar and Vaughns gave a talk about their contributions to the scheduling and quality-control programs at the TSU University Wide Research Day in March.)
3. Set up the CCD with an image projected on it and assess the stability of its images. (We did this last fall and are continuing to use the setup for running tests on the CCD-control systme.)
4. Rewrite the code for controlling the spectrograph so it runs under linux. (Williamson began this work in December and is continuing it in January. By late January, with the help of Bob Leach, who sent updated versions of the E-proms for the communications boards, he had the Linux computer communicating with the CCD controller. In mid February, he had the program acquiring exposures from the CCD and saving them to disc for perusal. The program was still hanging at times for reasons we do not yet understand, but it is no worse than under the manual interface [GUI]. As of late March, Williamson had corrected a problem with the way the image data were being stored (that put certain groups of columns in the wrong place) and got the binning to work. This control program seems to be working reliably as of 1 May.)
5. Integrate the program for controlling the spectrograph into the telescope-control system and run the code in a lab simulation. This task involves extending the executive program of the control system to send commands to the spectrograph controller [in the same way it sends commands to the telescope controller], to receive and log return messages from the spectrograph, and to decide if the spectrograph controller is hanging. (Williamson: This task requires getting the spectrograph-control program to run reliably under linux then putting in the communication and quality-control routines. Williamson did most of this in April and May.)