They've been having really bad results the last few days (late last week/the weekend). Sunday night Russ had problems parking the tertiary mirror. Monday morning her boss called: the tertiary was broken. Not the glass, fortunately. The tertiary sits at about a 45 degree angle and reflects light to whatever instrument is mounted on the side of the telescope. It has a "medallion" mounted in the center of the mirror, it's a metal disk that is the mount point for the main mount of the mirror. Apparently the medallion unbonded from the glass, i.e. the glue died.
This happened back in October. It took a few days to repair it (disassembly, cleaning, glueing, letting it set, reassembly), but apparently this special adhesive only has a six month life in the bottle, and the stuff used to do the repair in October was a little bit old and has now debonded.
So they have to order new glue. Seems to me that they ought to order it every five months. Anyway, the telescope will be down until the weekend at the earliest. Russet sent out emails to notify the people scheduled to observe, she received one reply: "Bummer."
Them nutty astronomers!
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