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

Attendees: Bruce Atwood, Jerry Mason, Dan Pappalardo, Ralph Belville, Jen Marshall, Darren DePoy, Ed Teiga, Tom O'Brien, Mark Derwent, Paul Byard, Pat Osmer, Dave Steinbrecher, and Rick Pogge.

Paul has examined the issue of refiguring the spherical surface on the damaged blue camera corrector lens parent. There will be no significant impact on the imaging performance, but care must be taken to maintain the radius of curvature of the optic (tolerance +1/-2 mm). We could remove as much as 1mm of material from the spherical surface. On review, he reported that he and Steve Miller decided that it would be best to do all the rework on the parent, and not on cut parts, as we need to test thoroughly before cutting.

Paul also asked for some specs on the calibration sources. Rick has been tasked with getting this done.

Tom reports that the multislit mechanism handling carts have been delivered and look good (see the picture below of the stylish cart constructed using the MB Building Kit made by item, a German company based in Solingen with a distributer in Akron). They've nearly finished zero-level testing of the multislit mechanism and so far things look very good.

Picture [621k JPEG] taken 2004 Dec 7

Mark has started with the AGW filter wheel design, and reports that we are receiving both purchased and machined parts for the AGW stage system. We will be letting the bid out tomorrow for machining of the optics mounts for the AGW stage, and have ordered all of the remaining optics.

One issue is that we will need to received an AGW wavefront sensor camera with its microlens array fairly early next year if we are to be able to test and verify our optics for delivering images to the off-axis WFS camera. Rick is tasked with staying on top of this as part of his work with the ad hoc AGW working group.

The calibration system continues to make progress. The parts for the 1-D insert/retract mechanism have been designed and are being fabricated, except for one part that still needs refined designed. The integrating spheres are back from the vendor, this time with the mounting holes in the right place with the specified size, and appear to work great.

The first of the new gear drives for the grating select turret is complete, and ready for assembly and testing. We also are undertaking some rework of the tilt mechanism to improve how these systems all work together. We are about ready to start fabrication of the other 3 copies of this mechanism.

Andy Krygier has done a very nice job of putting together an Excel-based index of all of our mechanical and optical purchases. This works great, and gives us an easy way to enter and search for all purchase sheets. He's moving on to helping us with the assembly documentation, translating stuff in notebooks into electronic form, and starting to help build the mechanism data sheets. This requires consolidation of data from a variety of sources, and is going very well.

Ray Gonzalez, currently of Goddard Spaceflight Center, will be joining our team as a software developer/engineer in mid-January 2005. Ray worked previously at Arecibo and with the VLBI group at Goddard, and will be initially tasked with the mechanism control system programming for MODS, working closely with Tom and Mark.