After the heavy snowtorms that affected Pachon, telescope operations have resumed, and IGRINS will be available for a short time starting tonight until the beginning of the yearly engineering shutdown.
Heavy snowfall at Cerro Pachon has completely wiped out the Zorro run originally scheduled between July 11 and 17th. We expect the telescope can be operating again on Monday 18th, and the Zorro run has been extended until Friday 22nd.
GNIRS has been reinstalled on the telescope and is ready for science use as of July 4th, 2022. All issues with the filter wheels have been fixed and other refurbishment projects have been completed. All slit spectral modes are now available in addition to imaging. The Low Resolution (natural seeing) IFU is installed and is undergoing commissioning. It will be released for science use at a later date. Fabrication of the High Resolution (AO-assisted) IFU is ongoing and is expected to arrive in Hilo at the end of 2022.
General maintenance has been scheduled for IGRINS between September 5th and 16th, when the instrument will be unavailable. A visiting team from KASI at Pachon will execute several tasks, including the replacement of one of the cold heads.
After the completion of the GHOST commissioning, the GHOST Cassegrain Unit was removed from the telescope and IGRINS was installed back on the same port last Monday. Back on sky checks were performed successfully on Tuesday night and the instrument was used immediately for science operations.
The GeMS Real Time Computer is currently experiencing technical difficulties preventing the use of the instrument for the rest of the June 2022 Run. Sincere apologies to our user's community!
The Gemini North Adaptive Optics system, Altair, is currently offline due to a recurrent and intermittent issue with its deformable mirror (DM). Please email your contact scientist if you have any questions or concerns about the potential impact on your program.
On April 28th, 2022 GNIRS is planned to be removed from the telescope and warmed up in order to perform the GNIRS IFU installation and various refurbishment work, which includes replacement of ball bearings for both filter wheels. It is foreseen to have GNIRS back on sky for the IFU commissioning on July 6th, 2022. During this period, NIRI will replace GNIRS on the telescope.
In January 2022, itermittent problems began to occur with GNIRS' filter wheel two (FW2). This was found to be due to a faulty ball bearing, which increased drag and friction on the wheel assembly. In order to prevent damage to FW2 or other components internal to GNIRS, a decision was made to avoid FW2 movements entirely. As a result, as of March 15th, 2022, observations were limited to cross dispersed mode only. The faulty ball bearing is to be substituted when GNIRS is warmed up to install the IFU at the end of April 2022.
A new webpage with information on the current status of the GMOS-N detector array is now available here. The webpage provides details on the recent hot column features (see March 10 announcement) and updated recommendations for dither strategies to minimize the impact of the hot columns on science data. Any future updates from the ongoing characterization of the hot columns will be posted on this webpage.