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UPDATE EVERYTHING BELOW THIS:

Attending: Nancy Chanover (NMSU), Bill Ketzeback (APO), Sarah Tuttle (UW), Chip Kobulnicky (UWy), Ben Williams (UW), Michael Hayden (OU), Misty Bentz (GSU), Eric Bellm (UW), Moire Prescott (NMSU)

• Georgia State - nothing to report
• Wyoming - nothing to report
• NMSU - nothing to report
• Washington - nothing to report (by email)
• Oklahoma - nothing to report
• UVa - nothing to report
• JHU - nothing to report
• BYU - nothing to report
• Seattle - nothing to report
• Colorado - nothing to report
• NAPG - no report

The detailed site report is included below, followed by additional information discussed during today's meeting.

3.5-m Telescope and Instruments Highlights, 8/06/25 – 09/02/25

1) Overview

The month of August experienced a mix of late afternoon monsoon storms that either delayed opening or affected many of the A half observing programs. We had two visiting instrument teams from U. Virginia this month. There was a failure of one of the main site network subnets that prevented observing and took down site phones as well as communications via TUI. Email was able to be received and sent from off site but not on site. We tracked the problem to a failure of a managed network switch and we were able to replace it with a spare. There was some difficulty loading the management given the switches were different models. The root cause is still not well understood as it looked like a cascading failure including the site DHCP server that also resulted in loss of communications with the site DNS servers. The problem took a little over 24 hours to resolve.

The hiring committees for the Telescope Engineer and Night Operation positions are in the process of reviewing candidates. There were a large number of applications for each opening.

2) Operations

3.5m Telescope: Telescope is working as expected. Seasonal motion errors have been infrequent. A full remap of the tertiary rotation was redone and this seems to have corrected the reported position errors from last month's report.

0.5m Telescope: Telescope is working as expected. ACP Library support errors are still occurring even with the dcam-spare camera swap but with much lower frequency. Dcam-spare had a loss of CCD chamber integrity and was forming ice on the detector while cold. The camera was serviced twice but now appears to have water spots on or near the detector surface. Cary Smith will attempt to clean but it is not without risk to the bonding wires of the detector. University of Virginia tested another surplus Apogee camera during their coordinated observing run with DSSI on the 3.5m. The off-axis guider has not been very reliable, requiring power cycles.

KOSMOS: System is cooled and stable. Increased dark current for long exposures has been confirmed. We attempted a vacuum servicing of the cryostat but without much luck. We anticipate having to open the vacuum vessel in the clean room sometime during Quarter 4 to investigate possible thermal shorts or opens. kcamera-ICC was backed up over shutdown.

ARCTIC: The diffuser rotation mechanism is still unreliable even after a full servicing. Troubleshooting is continuing. The mechanism that moves the diffuser in and out of the optical path is still functional in the meantime. The rest of the instrument is cooled.

Agile: The camera is non-operational, the thermoelectric cooler failed again. The camera is warm and we do not plan further repair work with this camera. We are planning on decommissioning the camera. The agile instrument rotator is still not performing nominally and we are troubleshooting it further to prepare for SoonerCam.

ARCES: The CCD reservoir for the cooling system was brought back to temperature. IOL levels are quite good but slowly worsening. We hope that it will stabilize and reverse direction with cooler ambient temperatures as we have seen in previous fall time frames. Work continues on a replacement and modern ICC, so far testing is going well. A commissioning report is being worked on.

DIS: System is cooled but in an unknown state for science. Decommissioning plans have begun.

NICFPS: System is cooled and usable. The ICS software has needed multiple restarts over the past month. The cause is unclear at this time.

TripleSpec: System is cooled and usable.

APOLLO: The instrument is usable for laser ranging.

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There is some OPEN time remaining in September (last month of Q3). We have received requests for some of it, but not all. To request this time please follow the standard procedure by emailing your request to Ben Williams, Russet McMillan, Amanda Townsend, Nancy Chanover, and your institutional scheduler. Be sure to include the specific slot you are requesting and a short justification.

Schedule is in the works.

Next week is the only open week (1.5 weeks really) remaining in the ARCSAT Q3 schedule.

• SoonerCam: we received a modest number of survey responses and will proceed using the information we have. The camera was purchased and a meeting is scheduled in two weeks to discuss the next steps.
• KOSMOS grisms: we are still awaiting a decision on the proposal we submitted for funds to support the purchase of three new grisms for KOSMOS.
• ASPEN: we are still awaiting a decision on the proposal we submitted for funds to support the development of the new echelle spectrograph. Work on the design of the new optical echelle spectrograph continues with the goal of completing the Preliminary Design Review in early 2026.
• Ocotillo: a number of purchase orders were executed and we expect the first batch of hardware to come in within the next month or so.

Open action items from previous meetings:

• UC reps: ask your users to complete the survey from FAWG (per Nancy’s email sent on 7/23/25). Status: CLOSED.

New action items from this meeting:

• None.

None.

The next meeting will be on October 7, 2025 at 10:30 MDT.