L. Datrier, J. Jones,  J. Kissel, R. McCarthy, T. Mistry, K. Venkateswara, D. Bhattacharjee

WP 8276
Final (Prototype) Design T1900357
Hazard Analysis E1900203
ECR E1900004

Krishna's swan song with the collaboration has been to deliver a function prototype of a newtonian gravitational calibration system (NCAL, or sometimes GCAL) on site today. With the help and witness of all those mentioned above (and safety approval from the systems team remotely), we were able to safely spin up the fully functional rotor to a maximum frequency the software allowed --  38.13 Hz --  and visually / roughly verified that the rotational encoder reported by the system matched the requested drive frequency at several drive frequencies (roughly 1, 5, 10, 20, and 30 Hz; "roughly" because we used an iphone app with a strobe as our independent measure of the rotation speed, but was still matching the encoder to above 0.1 Hz).

There is still LOADS to do, but today's tests were of great success because:
     (a) a lot more people feel a lot more comfortable with this system from a safety standpoint than before 
     (b) we [primarily Timesh and Kissel] download gobs of information from Krishna
     (c) We managed to get the system fully functional within 2 hours of arriving on site -- a great testament to Krishna's hard work, and all the hard work local and remote LIGO Lab staff have been doing, bending over backwards to push this project forward by leaps and bounds in the past few weeks.
I attach our chicken-scratch notes from the day for future reference.

Thank you to everyone -- you'll be hearing plenty more from this machine as we finish out prototype testing.

For now, the system will remain in the optics lab in the OSB for a week or three, and then we consider readiness for installation and further testing at the X End. 

As of this evening, we've left the system entirely powered off with the motor cable disconnected. We do not expect to be running this system again until Monday at the earliest.