Saturday, October 24, 2009

All done with M5!

On our way up to the clean room this morning we got to see one of the locals - a magnificent Black Harrier - out looking for breakfast...

This week we've repeated the M5 alignment process a few times, refining the procedure & checking Everything, over & over again. Satisfied with the spot positions & the quality of the wavefront, it was time to lock the tie-rods so that the mirror can no longer translate in X & Y. All the tests were then repeated to confirm that the locking process had not disturbed the alignment.

Next we needed to measure the positions of M2 & M5 with the Faro, before tilting the SAC over to its operational angle of 37 degrees. We removed the M5 pinhole stage assembly & the M4 mounting blocks to make things a liiittle easier for the Faro jockey.

Faro'ing at angle's a whole new game - Darragh resembled a weary boxer each time he plonked down to review the data after making a 1000-point measurement of the 14 invar buttons (each done 3x, not to mention the outer diameters of M2 & M5 which are even trickier).

We left for Cape Town straight after completing the measurements, but a quick look at the data showed that M2 & M5 both moved less than 80 microns in the Y-direction & they flew in formation :)

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