Janos

Today morning the pressure in HAM1 rose quite quickly to ~1E-3 Torr. As I was driving to the site, Richard found out that the new Agilent leak checker, which backed the turbo, stopped. So he valved out the turbo via its main gate valve.
After arrival, I valved out the leak checker, valved in the Supersucker cart's Anest Iwata ISP500 pump, and restarted the turbo, then valved it back again. The pressure very quickly dropped to ~7E-6 Torr (roughly where it was before the incident). Since then, everything is nominal.

In the afternoon around 3 pm I valved in IP13 (500 l/s Starcell) to HAM1. The pressure nicely dropped to the low E-6s, however, it started growing. I checked the controller in the MER, and found that it is unable to hold the usual -7000 Volts, in fact, it was around -3000 Volts, and dropping (towards 0). Moreover, I found that the controller's comm cable is not wired properly to CDS, its channel reads IP1/B ion pump. So I valved out the Ion-pump.
With Dave, Fil, Richard, and Patrick we looked into the problem, and we quickly found that the Ion-pump's comm cable physically was not wired in at all.
I quickly plugged the valved out Ion-pump to an IPC mini, which obviously hardly could hold the pressure, but the voltage still slowly converged to -7000 V. After this, I located a spare controller (brand new, identical to the one we used), also attached a bypass connector to the comm outlet, and plugged the Ion pump to this one. It quickly reached the nominal -7000 Volts. (See the new (left) and old, broken down (right) controller on the IP-controller rack in the MER).
Early next week, after (hopefully) a successful leak check on HAM1, the Ion-pump will be valved in permanently. The comm cable wiring will also be finalized later.