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Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope
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1. Science/Technical Highlight (Anyone)
2. Photos (Anyone)
3. Directorate (Thomas and Dave)
3.1 Activities
NSF CA/CSA renewal
Following the August meetings with NSF regarding the renewal of the Cooperative Agreement (CA) and Cooperative Support Agreement (CSA), T. Rimmele and D. Boboltz consulted with the NSO Director on the impacts of the various plans and timelines for required NSF reports, proposals and reviews including:
The NSO Annual Progress Report (APR) for FY23, due November 2023 and the NSO Annual Program Plan for FY24, due January 2024.
A 1 (or possibly 2) year extension of the current CA/CSA for management of NSO.
Preparation of a Concept of Operations (ConOps) document and subsequent NSF external review.
Preparation of a 5-year proposal for the renewal of the CA/CSA for management of NSO.
DKIST Cycle 3 call for proposals
D. Boboltz prepared a release for Solar News notifying the community of the delayed timeline for Cycle 3 and the move to a new annual schedule for DKIST that includes an extended winter engineering and maintenance period. This release is being reviewed internally.
SOLARNET meeting
T. Rimmele attended the SOLARNET Congress “Sun in Science and Society”, September 11-15, 2023 in Venice/Mestre (Italy) and presented an overview of the status of DKIST.
Boulder Solar Day
T. Rimmele and D. Boboltz along with other DKIST staff members attended Boulder Solar Day, September 29 at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder. T. Schad and D. Kuridze presented recent results from DKIST.
AURA Solar Observatory Council (SOC) meeting preparations
T. Rimmele prepared a DKIST overview talk for the SOC meeting and D. Boboltz prepared a talk on the DKIST Data Center with input from B. Tawa and A. Davey.
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DKIST operations carried forward approximately $28.16M in unencumbered funds into FY 2023 from previous years. A total of $11.9M in new funding has been obligated by NSF thus far in FY 2023 for a total funding amount of $40.06M.
Financial status of
DKIST operational expenditures for August 2023 were $3.05M
Total YTD expenditures for DKIST operations are $26.30M.
The average DKIST spending for FY 2023 (burn rate; BR) is $2.39M / month.
4. Science Operations (Ali and Andres)
4.1 Status of Observing
The fourth observing window (OCP2.4) closed on .
The fifth observing window (OCP2.5) opened on (and will close on ).
was spent on ViSP external focus verification (on-sun activity, Instrumentation Group) and a Cryo-NIRSP straylight mitigation improvement (on-sun activity, Instrumentation Group).
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4.8 Science Operations Tools
OpsTools (Proposal Architect work, Experiment Architect work, OPMT work, Loki work) updates/activities should be included here(?) (this is actually Bret or JohnH/HLS and Bob Tawa/OpsTools).
Ops tools and HLS staff met several times over the month of september to define prospective changes to the OT/HLS Interface Control Document. The original ICD was crafted at a time when uncertainty with respect to what data would be needed on either side was prevalent, since the system as a whole had never been operated. Now that the Ops tools have been built and used to guide the telescope operations, the knowledge gained about what in the ICD was useful, what was not, what was missing, and what was problematic has informed these meetings. A new draft ICD, with significant changes, will be developed sometime in October for review by the relevant parties.
The Operations Monitoring and Planning Tool (OPMT) update from Vue 2 to React continued. This upgrade was initiated due to uncertainty regarding the long term prospects of the Vue product, and the difficulty of changing from Vue 2 to Vue 3 which was done with the Proposal Architect. it is expected that this transition (OPMT V2 Beta) will be complete in early October for use/assessment/test by the sci ops team.
New terraform scripts were generated to create separate environments within AWS for production, development, and test stacks. Currently, all the stacks are built within the same environment, which is not a best practice. The expectation is that new environment will be built, provisioned and tested in October.
4.8.1 Management
Hiring process for new OpsTool software engineer, interviews scheduled. (Bob to fill in details).
DKIST Ops tools and Data Center staff interviewed seven candidates in the month of september for a senior software engineer to work on operations tools.
5 Technical Operations (Heather and Paul)
5.1 Site & Facility Status
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6 Instrumentation Operations (Bret, Friedrich, and Dave H.)
6.1 Optics
6.1.1 System Optics
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First short wave infra-red detectors have completed fabrication and are entering testing.
The Operation Concepts Definition document for the IR cameras has been created. This will be used to define the IR camera controller specifications.
7 Data Center Operations (Bob and Alisdair)
7.1 Hardware Infrastructure
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