Mirror support, HP2 failure

Wednesday, December 8, 2021 6:26 AM

Problem(s) Encountered:

Air bags were not functioning correctly at the start - the hardpoint readings were way off nominal and the images were bad.  Cured the problem by quitting the airbag program with QQ, restarting with SUPPORT, and disabling hardpoint 2 with H2.  After waiting a few minutes for things to equilibriate, the system worked well for the rest of the night.  Did not try 
reverting to standard mode.

Solution:

Hard points were all reading correctly this morning.  I restarted the mirror support system to get it servoing to the hard points and moved the telescope around a fair bit without issue.  I did notice that the air pressure was down around 20” of H2O instead of the nominal 23”, so I opened that flow a bit, but I think this has nothing to do with the issue.
I know that HP2 is slowly failing and likely it is at the connector.  I’ve gone ahead and made a pigtail with the proper connector in hopes I can ease the job of terminating that load cell when/if it comes to that.
In the meantime, what was done regarding ‘H2’ is a perfectly adequate option to stay on-sky.