#mavisfdr — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #mavisfdr, aggregated by home.social.
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Off we go. One of Emirates now somewhat dated un-refreshed A380-800 for the 6-ish hour short hop to Dubai, a tight 2 hour connection there, then the over 14 hour ordeal to Sydney.
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I'd forgotten how much Munich airport Terminal 1 sucks. Once you're airside it's basically just one big, very long corridor with gates on one side. Not much food and drink, very little duty free shopping, not a lot of seating, and a notable lack of power outlets. It was a mistake to come here early.
I have at least managed to get myself a Currywurst, a beer, and a seat.
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Returning to the models of @esoastronomy, I have to applaud whoever built this amazing Lego model of Paranal Observatory.
They included the 4 Unit Telescopes, 4 Auxiliary Telescopes, the VLT Survey Telescope, the control building, the VLTI Lab, and even a representation of the VLTI delay lines and beam combiner lab below the Platform. Unit Telescope 4, the eventual home of the MAVIS instrument, even has its four laser beams.
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In the @esoastronomy technical building is the integration hall, where there is more hardware related to the ELT telescope.
In the corner there is a prototype section of ELT primary mirror support structure with 7 aluminium dummy mirror segments on it.
The blue structure is the ELT Phasing & Diagnostic System (PDS), currently under construction. This instrument will be installed on the telescope to measure the shape of the primary mirror, allowing the positions of the 798 mirror segments to be adjusted so that they are perfectly aligned and can act as a single 39 metre diameter mirror.
It is expected that the PDS will be used roughly once a week to tune the primary mirror. Between tune ups the edge sensors between the mirror segments will be used to maintain the mirror's shape.
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Elsewhere in the @esoastronomy building is this, a prototype primary mirror segment for the ELT telescope. Eventually the mirror will be assembled from 798 segments just like this one, but shinier and with fewer signatures.
Underneath is a prototype version of the mirror segment support structure and actuators, required to ensure that all the mirror segments remain perfectly aligned with each other.
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While at @esoastronomy HQ I also had to snap some photos of this impressive model of the ELT telescope. Soon the real thing will be looking like this. Note the toy cars for scale.
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I cannot visit @esoastronomy HQ without photographing and posting about this video game box.
It is not just a bit of astronomy themed retro box art, there is an actual retro game to go with it too. It was written for the Atari 2600 but can also be played online: https://pietrow.net/atari/astronomer/
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Some background info on what MAVIS is, from Astronomy Australia Ltd's blog: https://astronomyaustralia.org.au/blog/news/mavis-a-bold-leap-in-australian-led-astronomy-and-adaptive-optics/
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Tomorrow I'm flying to Germany for the MAVIS instrument Final Design Review, which is good.
That does mean I'm going to have to get up in time to take a taxi to the airport at 3:30 am, which is bad. Very bad.
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It's time to plan my travel to lovely* Garching bei München for the MAVIS Final Design Review meetings next month.
I am a *big* fan of these Emirates/Qantas flights from Sydney to Munich that arrive in the evening. When you get off the plane you can go directly from the airport to your hotel, check in immediately, and fall straight into bed. This is so, so much better than almost all other flights from Australia to Europe which arrive early in the morning so you can't even check into your hotel until many hours later, and you're struggling to stay awake until evening in an attempt to avoid making your jetlag worse.
OK, you do have to get up at stupid o'clock in the morning to get the 6 am flight out of Sydney, but it's definitely worth it. I got these flights last time I travelled to @esoastronomy HQ for the MAVIS Preliminary Design Review and the evening arrival made for a really quick recovery from the journey with minimal jetlag.
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In the end we submitted a total of 5625 pages of MAVIS Final Design Review documentation spread across 172 documents. Now we wait for the Jira tickets to start coming in...
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We're now up to 5149 pages of MAVIS instrument Final Design Review documentation, and there are still a few documents to go. In total we'll be sending 163 documents to @esoastronomy for review. MAVIS is a complex thing, as the latest CAD renders make evident, so a complete description requires a lot of documents.
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Giving our colleagues at @esoastronomy a little light reading, just in time for their August holiday season: we (the MAVIS consortium) have just uploaded 4419 pages of documentation for the MAVIS instrument Final Design Review. That's only 114 of the required 141 deliverable documents, so there's still some more to come over the coming days.
The reviewers at ESO will go over all of this, creating, probably, hundreds of Jira tickets asking for clarifications, additional information, or changes. Once we've had a chance to respond to and close as many of those tickets as possible we'll have the formal Final Design Review itself, a 3 day meeting in mid-October to address remaining issues and assess the readiness of the design as a whole.