GBT Operations & Commissioning Meeting
AGENDA
Last Week
=========
Observations for proposals
GBT06C-051, GBT06A-053, GBT06A-054,
GBT06B-042, BB209 , GBT06C-032,
GBT06A-014, GBT06B-036, GBT06C-035,
BB228 , GBT06C-013, GBT06C-025,
GBT04B-014, GBT06C-038, GBT06C-049,
GBT06C-104, GBT06C-016, GBT06C-039,
GBT06C-019
Completed proposals
BB209, GBT06C-104
Next Week
=========
Observations scheduled for **
GBT06C-051 [ P ] Lincoln Greenhill
Monitoring 2 NGC4258-like Masers: Measurement of
Distances / Constraint of LCDM
GBT06B-032 [F ] Steve Begin
Timing of the Binary and Millisecond Pulsars in
M28
GBT06B-044 [ B] Robert Ferdman
Timing Binary and Millisecond Pulsars from the
Parkes Multibeam Survey
GBT06B-033 [F ] Jason Hessels
Completing a 350-MHz Survey of the Galactic Plane
for Pulsars and Transients
GBT06C-032 [F B] Peter Martin
The Galactic foreground at the North Ecliptic Pole
GBT06B-034 [ B] Jacqueline van Gorkom
Galaxy evolution in groups: HI properties of 80
2dfGRS-selected groups
GBT05B-011 [ B] Toney Minter
Using Pulsar HI Absorption to Determine the
Distance to the Local Spiral Arm in the Second
Quadrant of the Galaxy
GBT06C-035 [ P ] Jim Braatz
The Megamaser Cosmology Project: A Survey for H2O
Maser Disks in SDSS AGNs
BB228 [F ] Michael Bietenholz
The Evolution of the Central Source in SN 1986J
GBT06B-036 [FP ] Jim Jackson
Pre-stellar evolution in Infrared Dark Cloud Cores
GBT06C-025 [ B] Amanda Kepley
Magnetic Fields in Irregular Galaxies: NGC 1156
and Holmberg II
BB227 [F ] Jim Braatz
Measuring the Extragalactic Distance Scale
GBT06B-015 [ P ] Larry Morgan
NH3 and CCS Mapping of Triggered Star Formation
Regions
GBT04A-027 [ P ] Brian Mason
Determining the High Frequency Properties of mJy
radio sources
GBT06B-028 [F ] Ingrid Stairs
Timing the Planet Pulsar in M4
BM253 [F ] Emmanuel Momjian
Resolving the Compact Radio Emission of the
Luminous Submillimeter Galaxy GOODS 850-3 at z=1.8
GBT06C-049 [F B] Karen Masters
Mapping Matter in the Nearby Universe with 2MASS
GBT06C-038 [F B] Jay Lockman
GBT Mapping of HI Clouds in the Disk-Halo
Interface
BB233 [F ] Michael Bietenholz
Does the Ursa Minor Dwarf Spheroidal Host an
IntermediateMass Black Hole?
GBT06B-019 [ B] Toney Minter
Obtaining A Complete Sample Of Pulsar OH
Absorption With The GBT
GBT06C-019 [ P ] Satoshi Yamamoto
Testing the Production Pathways of CCS
GBT06A-071 [ B] Fernando Camilo
Constraining the distance to the magnetar XTE
J1810-197 via HI absorption
** Scheduled as F-ixed, P-rimary, B-ackup
Contact Information for 12/21/2006 - 01/04/2007
=======================================
Proposal PI Bands Email [NRAO contact]
---------- ------------------ ----- --------------------
GC028 John Conway U jconway@oso.chalmers.se []
GBT04A-040 Steve Myers XUB smyers@nrao.edu []
GBT06B-042 Nissim Kanekar 4 nkanekar@nrao.edu [Larry Morgan]
GBT06A-054 Paul Demorest 8 demorest@astron.berkeley.edu [Scott Ransom]
GBT06C-052 Scott Ransom 8 sransom@nrao.edu [Scott Ransom]
GBT06C-032 Peter Martin L pgmartin@cita.utoronto.ca [Jay Lockman]
GBT06B-044 Robert Ferdman L ferdman@phas.ubc.ca [Scott Ransom]
GBT06A-013 Jim Braatz U jbraatz@nrao.edu [Jim Braatz]
GBT06A-014 Andrea Tarchi K a.tarchi@ira.inaf.it [Jim Braatz]
GBT06C-013 Steve Curran 4 sjc@phys.unsw.edu.au [Carl Bignell]
GBT06A-015 Sandrine Bottinell Q sandrine@ifa.hawaii.edu [Dana Balser]
GBT06C-035 Jim Braatz K jbraatz@nrao.edu [Jim Braatz]
GBT06B-037 Joel Weisberg L jweisber@carleton.edu [Toney Minter]
GBT06C-048 Nissim Kanekar 8 nkanekar@nrao.edu [Toney Minter]
GBT05C-026 Tom Devlin X devlin@physics.rutgers.edu [Brian Mason]
GBT04A-027 Brian Mason B bmason@nrao.edu [Brian Mason]
GBT06C-049 Karen Masters L kmasters@cfa.harvard.edu [Larry Morgan]
GBT06C-038 Jay Lockman L jlockman@nrao.edu [Jay Lockman]
GBT06C-017 Miles Blanton U mcb39@physics.unc.edu [Frank Ghigo]
GBT06C-039 Jim Braatz K jbraatz@nrao.edu [Jim Braatz]
BB234 Edward Boyce C eboyce@mit.edueboyce@nrao.edu []
GBT06C-018 Ingrid Stairs LS istairs@astro.ubc.ca [Scott Ransom]
GBT06C-008 Raghunathan Sriana 4 anand@iucaa.ernet.in [Toney Minter]
GBT01A-005 Barry Turner Q bturner@nrao.edu [Frank Ghigo]
GBT06A-071 Fernando Camilo L fernando@astro.columbia.edu [Scott Ransom]
BB231 Jim Braatz K jbraatz@nrao.edu []
Scheduled hours [backup]
========================
Category/Month-> December January
Astronomy ~ 581 [223] 554 [345]
Maintenance ~ 57 [017] 55 [068]
Test & Comm ~ 71 [016] 44 [012]
Shutdown ~ 36 0
Un-assigned ~ 5 98
Proposal Checkouts
==================
Awaiting checkout - 0
Active checkout - 0
On Hold - 16
Schedule - 66
Completed - 576
Current backlog [hours prior to 06C*] = 850
[2001:2(1), 2002:0(4), 2003:19(1), 2004:100(21), 2005:469(22), 2006:260(15)]
Backlog excluding 162 hrs of monitoring projects after 06C = 688
Total time to discharge [hours] = 3988
Includes 250 hours of monitoring after trimester 06C
* Includes projects that are on hold for trimester 06C
Lots of activity this week has the team scurrying.
- Studs and nuts were delivered to the site on Monday, and stored at the GBT.
- Tests of a grout-friendly primer to be applied to the base plates were conducted by the supplier and look acceptable.
- Base plates are being machined in Savannah. Dennis and Bob went down to observe. Bugs are being worked out of the machining program. The weld procedure didn't pass and has to be modified. A new trial plate has been welded and is being tested this weekend. Dennis, Harry, and Bob will be back in Savannah next week to witness the welding process and do quality assurance dimension checks.
We supported 18 projects in 29 observing sessions, including 2 VLB runs. The telescope was also scheduled for maintenance (9 hrs), software tests (7 hrs), Q-band commissioning 4.5 hrs, results reported below), and receiver checkout (1 hr). Lost time was relatively low -- 2.8 hrs or about 1.9% of the time schedules for observing and commissioning. The major sources of lost time were:
- Solar Flare : 0.6 hrs
- Winds : 0.6 hrs
- Astrid lockups (5 instances) : 0.5 hrs
- Spigot library (see Scott's report) : 0.3 hrs
- Dynamic Corrections : 0.3 hrs
- Optical Driver 6 : 0.2 hrs
- Extended software tests : 0.2 hrs
- Scan Coordinator (2 instances) : 0.1 hrs
- Spectrometer (power surge?) : 0.1 hrs
The SDD is looking into the recent increase in Scan Coordinator crashes.
The latest Q-band commissioning run was successful. We're hopeful the moisture condensation has been whipped.
The Zpectrometer rack is being removed (today if weather allows), and Ku-band will go back up next week, in the N8 turret slot.
The intermittant instability in IF7, by process of elimination, was caused by a faulty laser/optical modulator combination. Replacements were spliced in yesterday, and the link is back in service.
Ongoing work includes fabrication and test of buffered power dividers for
the Optical Receivers (four units in the system have been upgraded),
upgrades of the RFI cages in the active surface room (about half have been
completed), and development of the RFI monitoring station for the GBT. We're fighting some reliability issues with one of the amplifier chips in the new Optical Receiver divider assemblies.
Design work continues for the C-band integrated receiver package. Artwork design nears completion, and gerber files are going out for quotations.
We're wrapping up preparations for arrival of the MIT/LL crew with a cryogenic 43m receiver, currently planned for the week of January 2.
Next week, Sri will be here on Thursday at 1pm to present some design study results of a possible dual-band PF feed.
Digital Group Status 02-DEC-06 THRU 08-DEC-06
***Operations, Problem Summary***
There were no significant problems to report this week.
Active Surface Maintenance...
- One H-DRIVE module was replaced which reactivated one disabled actuator.
- One LVDT module was replaced which reactivated a group of 64 disabled actuators.
***Development***
Caltech Continuum Backend (CCB)...
Construction of CCB #3 is still underway with a newly revised completion date of 22-DEC-06.
Spectrometer LTA Re-design...
Design of the new FPGA Adapter PCB is nearly finished. What remains is to come up with a panelized version of the circuit board in order to reduce fabrication costs and to work with Mike Hedrick and/or Jeff Cromer to come up with a de-panelizing fixture for use in the Machine Shop.
ALMA...
On-going efforts are continuing fairly smoothly on the ALMA front with only a few minor problems uncovered on the new circuit board assemblies.
***Plans***
- Continue construction of CCB #3...
- Continue design of new LTA FPGA adapter circuit board and de-panelizing fixture...
- Continue ALMA efforts as required...
Randy
We are in week three of the eighth (and final) development cycle of 2006 which can be viewed at PlanOfRecordC82006. We are scheduled to release mid-February 2007. Items deemed ready for release before that time will be patched in after they have been fully tested.
Operational support was relatively light this week and included:
- We responded to a Scan Coordinator core dump: No core files were given because of size limit; which has been increased. We're currently waiting for another core dump to occur yielding a core file and thus more information.
- Investigated error in name generation of device fits files. The reported time of the ygor daemons was 1 full minute less than the actual start time. Error is in TimeStamp library utility. As yet unresolved.
- Assisted ScottRansom during a failure of 'spigot_takedata'. The problem turns out to have been caused by the recent upgrade of 'cfitsio' from 2.4 to 2.5, combined with the use of the system installation in the Spigot Makefiles (instead of the /home/gbt1/cfitsio installation). An additional wild-card was that the the system (not GBT) 2.4 installation set up an incorrect link to the library which was then incorporated in the Spigot executable. The 2.4 link was named 'name=libcfitsio.2.4.so' instead of the more conventional 'libcfitsio.2.4.so'. The immediate solution to Scott's problem was to create the bogus link in /usr/lib on spigot2 and point it to '/home/gbt1/cfitsio/i386-linux/libcfitsio.so'. The long term solution is to modify the Spigot Makefiles.
Modification Requests:
- MRs ready for integration/regression testing:
- GFM/Turtle Upgrade - Remove use of LPCs.conf file (ModificationRequest4C706)
- Testing went well. We will be releasing this on a maintenance day soon.
- Investigate & Fix Cause of Astrid Hang-ups (ModificationRequest9C706)
- Testing went well. We will be releasing this on a maintenance day soon.
- MRs ready for sponsor testing:
- MRs under development
- Modify SDFITS and aips++ to correctly process Spectrometer cross-polarization data (ModificationRequest2C706)
- This is done. BobGarwood will notify Robishaw so that he can test it out on his data. GFM works fine on this although we think we should change the Tsys calculation for xcorr data in the spectral line plug in.
- SDFits Changes - Add target position and HIGH_CAL keywords to sdfits and other requested sdfits changes (ModificationRequest3C706)
- Minor update to the MR after reflection on an e-mail from Robishaw (change in how the first 1024-lags will be used in x-corr case - checked but not fixed, just flagged if bad).
- GBTIDL Changes necessary in support of related sdfits tool changes (ModificationRequest8C706)
- Change scaling for the Autocorrelation Spectra in the Spectrometer (ModificationRequest6C706)
- Done (except for documentation changes and release notes). Now in integration. GFM appears to work fine with these changes - note that because GFM displays total power values that these raw numbers are 2x larger than they were before these changes, as expected.
- Change GO fits file so that RA is in degrees (ModificationRequest15C705)
- Code commited in CVS. Must change Documentation.
- Develop New Pointing Pre-Processing Application (ModificationRequest5C706)
- Refactored supporting configuration file code, and pointing related peak processing code. Testing affected GFM code to ensure that it works with refactored code. Just started modification of peakdata to use newly refactored code, and complete the required functionality per MR.
- MRs under CCC review:
- Other Activities:
- Dynamic Scheduling - We continued work on testcases in database. Done examining Weather: predicted winds vs. actual winds. More work on wind in the test database. Unfortunately, we have to reevaluate how we are specifying and using as far as wind and tsys values. Initial version of software suite specification is complete. We are also laying out plans for future simulation tests, and examining GBT wind data vs. PTCS specifications.
- Balancing Project - FrankGhigo has updated the MRs. MelindaMello and AmyShelton are reviewing them and adding our comments in-line. The implementation of these MRs is expected in C1 of 2007.
- Zpectrometer Support - An update to the existing MR is nearly complete; the update contains all of the latest Zpectrometer knowledge. Support continues. We made some minor modifications to the Manager. Changes to the wasp2 software are in progress to ensure that the Zpectrometer starts and ends scans in sync with all other devices. These changes will be reflected as well in the updated MR. "Abort" stress tests are to be performed after the Zpectrometer is removed from the GBT.
- Servo Test Support & Analysis - JoeBrandt is working with the Servo group on changes for friction compensation. An MR has been written and there is code ready for servo testing.
- Track Model Support - JoeBrandt started a PTCS project note which describes the processing the antenna does to convert refracted az/el commands into servo commands, and vice-versa.
PTCS -- John and Richard
- Engineering - John
- Servo upgrade for summer 2007 is proceeding well. This is the servo interlock upgrade.
- Slow-speed tracking effects have been modeled, and look sort of the same as the results we see on the telescope. Friction compensation fixes the problem in the model, so it may well fix the problem on the telescope. We'll see later this month when we test.
- Tim built a circuit to sum in the friction compensation commands. It remains to be tested.
- Steve and John S. have nearly completed the noise abatement on the LRF electronics. Testing will follow.
- Astronomy
- Frank, Todd and Richard have started discussions about how to process inclinometer data in order to combine astronomical peak data and inclinometer data together into generation of the pointing model. This work will continue over the coming weeks.
- We need to remember to activate the OOF gravity model!
Been awhile since I've had an update...
First off, thanks to everyone who helped out with the UVa Grad Student visit last week, especially those who I put on the spot at the last minute and asked to give tours/demos/briefings (i.e. Mike Stennes, Carla Beaudet, and Glen Langston). And big thanks to Becky for arranging the rooms and to Richard for waiving all the fees. Too bad the weather wasn't a bit better! The students really enjoyed it anyways, though.
No progress on the Spigot 8-bit modes recently. However, UVa classes finish this week, so after I grade the finals and projects next week, Ryan and I will dig into the C code again. I did manage to make some significant upgrades to the Spigot timing code, though. The improvements (which I've already passed as part of PRESTO to several of the Spigot observers for additional testing) make it a lot simpler (and more accurate) to make timing measurements with the Spigot. It automatically corrects for a 1/2 channel frequency offset and the ~39 ms timing errors that have always been present.
We did have a strange Spigot problem this week that luckily happened during my Ter5 observations. The Spigot wouldn't take data at all due to a dynamic library issue with RHEL. Apparently the old version of CFITSIO had a bad library name and after the recent upgrade, switching to the correct library name caused the dynamic linker to miss the new library. I think this affected an observation that Fernando tried to make last week, but he was getting good BCPM data and didn't want to bother anyone. Bottom line is that (I think) this is fixed now, but it shows that we accidentally had some release software that was breakable based on a minor OS upgrade.
MIT/LL 43m Project -- Glen
Normal spacecraft tracking. Two computer engineers will arrive Saturday, Dec 9 and depart Monday Dec 11.
The MIT/LL group plans to drive down on January 2 or 3 to start installation of their dewar.
They would like their Feed Box in the 43m control room on Jan 3.
Zpec will be coming down today and will be replaced by Ku-band. We're still forming ideas as to the cause of Ka-band baseline problems and possible test plans to verify the problem.
We had a very successful Q-band observing run, even though high wind limited us to the kinds of tests we could perform. We detected SiO from an evolved star, recombination lines and a few molecular lines from W3(OH), and have ~2 hrs of 800 MHz observations of the NCP that show very good baselines.
- Every month : Pointing -- 1 night/month except in November, A/B weather, dynamically scheduled.
-
Week of Sep 4 : C-band off telescope
- Week of Sep 11: Penn Array on telescope in C-band slot
- Sept 11 - Oct 27 : Penn Array commissioning -- 1 night/week, A-weather, dynamically scheduled. 8 nights max. Extended to Nov 7
- Sept : Ka-band, Q-band, Zpectrometer lab tests
- Week of Oct 2 - week of Oct 12 : Penn Array backup daytime engineering time : 4 day-times max.
- On or before week of Oct. 9 : Ka-band placed on telescope
- Oct 16 - Nov 13: Ka-band spectral-line commissioning -- 1 night/week, A-weather, dynamically scheduled. 3 nights max.
- Oct 16 - Nov 13: CCB quick checkout (2-3 hours), time permitting.
- Week of Oct. 23 (earlier if it's practical and if the astronomy schedule has no conflicts): Ku-band down, X-band moved to where Ku-band was, Zpectrometer on telescope where X was
- On or before week of Oct. 30 : Q-band on telescope
- Oct 31 : Fixed maintenance day for Zpectrometer checkout
- No later than week of Nov. 6 : Penn Array down, C-band up in its place. Actually happened week of Nov. 13
- Nov 6 - Dec 14 : Q-band commissioning -- 1 night/week, A-weather, dynamically scheduled. 3 nights max. Started Nov. 13
- Nov 13 - Dec 1 : Ka-band CCB continuum commissioning and Ka-band Zpectrometer testing -- Sharing four dynamically scheduled, daytime/evening sessions (~noon to ~midnight) for A/B weather. Zpectrometer will have up to ~ 25 hrs, CCB the remaining ~ 15 hrs.
- After Dec. 1 : Ka-band observations can commence, preference given to low-risk continuum projects.
- No later than week of Dec. 4 : Zpectrometer down , Ku-band up where Zpec was.
- Dec. 11 - Dec. 21 : PTCS OOF Tests -- A-weather, dynamically scheduled, 2 nights max.
- After Dec. 15 : Q-band observations can commence.
- C-band, Remove: week of Sep 4, Install: no later than week of November 7 Actually installed Nov. 15
- Penn Array, Install: week of Sep 11, Remove: no later than week of Oct 31 Actually removed Nov. 14
- Ka-band, Install: on or before the week of Oct 9
- Zpectrometer Install: week of Oct 23; Remove: no later than week of Dec 4
- Ku Remove: on or before week of Oct 23 ; Install: no later than week of Dec 4
- X-band moved to Ku-band slot: on or before week of Oct 23
- Q-band, Install: on or before the week of Oct 30
-- RichardPrestage - 07 Dec 2006
Revision r1.13 - 08 Dec 2006 - 14:38 GMT - RichardPrestage
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