S. Dwyer, J. Jones, J. Kissel, T. Shaffer

Just a few notes on the things out of the ordinary during today's maintenance recovery:
    (1) Upon finishing initial alignment (to the now-standard "zeroed / centered" spot positions for acquisition), we had a good bit of trouble with ALS COMM. Found the COMM beat note was "low" at -9 dBm, though we've been skating by at this level for a few days. Thinking it was similar to the DIFF beatnote, we first adjusted the position of PR3. However, after having done so, MICH, PRMI, and DRMI were getting zero flashes (which makes sense, since initial alignment requires PR3 to be in a fixed position, and the IFO alignment is sensitive to PR3 position at the 0.25 - 0.5 urad level, and that's how much we had to move it). So, instead, we revert the PR3 position, and adjusted the position of the ALS / POP in-vacuum steering mirror via picomotor. The units aren't calibrated, but the COMM beat note was highest ~ -5 dBm with an X & Y position of the picomotor adjusted by a few 10s of counts.

    (2) PRMI ASC did an excellent job of recovering a rather gross looking PRMI after that -- nice work!

    (4) We had programmed in the July spot positions a priori, so we have now steered their instead of the "August" positions after turning on ENGAGE_SOFT_LOOPS, but this also went relatively smoothly.
        EDIT: There was a typo in the modified guardian code -- we're still in the August spot positions

    (3) Once we got in to full IFO resonance and began turning on FULL IFO ASC -- every suspension started saturating. Found that the DHARD P control signal was very large (even though the error signal was small), so reduced the gain from standard -50 to -30. (And then later reverted).
        EDIT: Our suspicion is that this problem was a result of the ISC_LOCK bug in spot position placement. The code had us going from "centered" to "July" to "August" in rapid succession -- and this path takes us *through* the point absorber.

    (5) The OMC_LOCK guardian had trouble recognizing there was light going in to the OMC, needed to re-request "DOWN" of the OMC_LOCK guardian before it successfully locked the OMC. TJ & Sheila will look into to modifying the Guardian so it takes care of this hiccup on its own.

The only "problems" were (1), (3), and (5). We attribute (1) to the lingering collection of issues associated with the initial alignment reference lost in early August, and not a "fault" of maintenance day activity. (3)'s cause is still unclear, but not yet terribly abnormal that the FULL IFO ASC struggles a bit to pull the alignment of the IFO in from the initial alignment references after a maintenance day. EDIT: (3)'s cause was the errant attempt at reverting spot positions.

Started recovery (initial alignment) at 19:12 UTC.
Recovered to nominal low noise by 21:44 UTC, and we've agreed to do a bit of commissioning (restoring OMC ASC offsets to correspond with the new spot positions, and further 48 Hz feature research) and calibration (to capture the new spot position impact).