The Ohio State University College of Mathematical & Physical Sciences Department of Astronomy

Minutes taken by Darren DePoy. Rick was attending a meeting at NASA/GSFC.

Optics

We are starting to receive word from potential vendors on the optics bid package, including a few "no bid" responses. Due to the nature of the process we will not give details in these public reports. Contact Paul Byard or Darren DePoy for information.

Paul is continuing to work on modeling grating efficiencies using the G-Solver program. He is currently working to check the output against the published Bauch&Lomb grating curves.

A preliminary design for an ADC is in progress. While the baseline does not call for an ADC, we are trying to assess what this gets into (and whether we want to/can afford to get into it).

Mechanical

Tom O'Brien is continuing with the grating tilt and support mechanism design, see outside his door for the latest AutoCAD drawings (we'll post the better ones on the web shortly). He is currently testing the grating tilt bearing in the lab, and hopes to finish soon and move on to other system tests planned for the summer.

Detectors

Bruce has successfully gotten a circular CCD working in the lab. While not actually part of MODS proper, the multi-amplifier readout system is important to the eventual CCD Mosaic development, and so an important milestone.

Acquisition & Guiding

Feedback from Potsdam on the AGW (Acquire-Guide-Wavefront) units indicates that MODS will not work with the current AGW module being designed for the bent-Gregorian focii, and so a variant has to be worked out, most likely using the components of the AGW, if only the "AG" parts (no AO wavefront sensing).

To determine how to proceed, Pat and Rick are tasked with developing questions for next week's meeting that set our operational requirements for the acquisition & guiding system for MODS, in the context of what we need observationally. These will be used to flesh out detailed functional requirements for our next iteration with Potsdam and LBTO on how to equip the straight-Gregorian focus for A&G.