Subject: SPICAM out of service

From: elt@astro.Princeton.EDU

Submitted: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 12:13:50 -0400 (EDT)

Message number: 56 (previous: 55, next: 57 up: Index)

As those of you who read the night logs will have already noted,
SPIcam stopped recording images on the night of 16 August.  

Unfortunately, a week-long attempt to diagnose and/or repair the
problem at APO has not met with success, and it appears that there
is a significant problem within the dewar.  Thus, the SPIcam dewar 
is being shipped to UW tomorrow (22 August) where it will be 
repaired.

Therefore, it appears likely that the instrument will be unavailable
for a considerabvle period, at least a week and quite possibly longer.
Procedures and options for dealing with the resultant schedule
modifications will be announced on Monday or Tuesday (24 or 25 August).
The purpose of this message is to alert those affected as early as
possible.

The instrument engineering staff at APO and the SPIcam instrument group
at UW have worked long and hard to fix the problem already this week,
and will continue to do so.  We are very grateful for their efforts.

Ed Turner
Bruce Gillespie

APO APO APO APO APO  Apache Point Observatory 3.5m  APO APO APO
APO
APO  This is message 56 in the apo35-dsc archive. You can find
APO  the archive on http://www.astro.princeton.edu/APO/apo35-dsc/INDEX.html
APO  To join/leave the list, send mail to apo35-request@astro.princeton.edu
APO  To post a message, mail it to apo35-dsc@astro.princeton.edu
APO
APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO APO