Thomas Vo, Arnaud Pele, Greg Grabeel

Aligned the ITMx CO2 laser in-vacuum mirrors this morning. Using the alignment laser from the CO2 table Thomas and I aligned through the irises onto the periscope mirrors. Once I was inside the chamber we found that while the laser entered the first viewport glass fairly well centered it is fairly low on the second, inner viewport glass. Because of the low path through the inner viewport glass, the alignment laser ran a bit high onto SM1 (BSC3 steering mirror). However, SM1 was able to center the beam path nicely onto SM2 (BSC2 steering mirror). Arnaud and I had to fight SM2 for quite awhile to get well aligned onto the ITMx test mass. SM2 requires brute force instead of finesse in its adjustment but it was eventually cudgeled into place.

Thomas was able to manually drive the upper-periscope mirror adjustments to test for clipping issues. Everything looked good with the beam path we only encountered path issues when the alignment laser was driven off the test mass horizontally, the alignment laser would clip off the upper edges of SM1. It doesn't appear that this will be an issue in any sort of normal operation though.