2024 December 2 - 6

DKIST General

• The DKIST team along with the VTF team from KIS achieved an important milestone this week; first sunlight for the single-etalon VTF. Thank you to all who have contributed (science, software, engineering and telescope support) in both Boulder and Maui. Congratulations to all for achieving this important milestone! 

• The DKIST senior leadership team has been working on an NSF-requested Concept of Operations plan for DKIST. This plan is due December 18, 2024, with a review on Maui scheduled for the week of February 10, 2025.

Operational Status

• DKIST is in week 2 of instrumentation on-Sun observing period InstOps 2024e.

Personnel

• The DKIST team has multiple job postings for positions on Maui.

SciOps and OpsTools team

Accomplishments

• Worked on the DKIST Concept of Operations plan.

• The Cycle 3 Experiment Generation process officially started on December 02. Ten DKIST scientists are assigned to create, review, and test the experiments for Cycle 3. The plan is to have all the experiments available for summit execution before the end of February 2025.

• Release of the SOS Daily Report form (V3) with some improvements to log activities during days in an observing window.

• Program scientist and manager working on Conceptual Operations (ConOps) in preparation for the NSF ConOps review in February 2025.

TechOps team

Accomplishments

• Worked on the DKIST Concept of Operations plan.

• The TechOps team supported the Instrumentation team and the VTF team for on-Sun testing of VTF.

InstOps team

Accomplishments

• Worked on the DKIST Concept of Operations plan.

• Visible Tunable Filter on-sun testing has been completed. Data was collected through the single etalon configuration and wavelength scans were successfully performed. The VTF team is headed back to Freiburg this weekend. Our thanks to the Maui on-sun and engineering support teams for their fantastic assistance.

• The IR camera team has issued the final down-selection report for the camera controller.

• New coude tables for the upcoming MCAO and M9b upgrades have arrived on the summit. Installation work will proceed next week.

• Final scheduling activities for Jan and February engineering periods. Priorities will be the M7 realignment, the optical path verification after the new table installations, the ViSP data tests with the new optics, and mitigation work on the wavefront DM controllers.

Data Center team

Accomplishments

• Worked on the DKIST Concept of Operations plan.

• Enhanced automated processing test infrastructure with:

  • self service stack reset

  • additional L1 regression test pipeline to conditionally include long running tests based on deployment risk

• Began design process for capturing calibration products for trend analysis and as metadata for dataset distribution.

• Added out of the box Ceph Metrics and created logic functions to add Ceph metrics to the new Observability Framework

EHS team

Accomplishments

• Worked on the DKIST Concept of Operations plan.

• Prepared and submitted the bi-monthly DKIST Safety and Health report.