O1 day 57

model restarts logged for Fri 13/Nov/2015 No restarts reported

The landscape crew will begin removing tumbleweeds that have accumulated on the arm access roads. This will involve using the tractor and bailing machine.

I have requested they begin on the X-Arm where the buildup seems to be the greatest.

Title: Ops Owl Summary, 08:00-16:00UTC (00:00-08::00PT)

State of H1:  trying to relock 

Incoming Operator: JimW

Shift Summary:  winds and useism kept the IFO down

Details:

- when I arrived the ETMX ISI was oscillating and that took until about 14:00UTC to "fix" though I don't' know what I did that had a good effect

--- I took the ISI to OFFLINE, then back to FULLY ISOLATED and engaging stage2 thew it into oscillations

--- I had to manually engaged stage2, and was confused by the ISI position not matching the setpoints, and will ask Jim, who's coming in at 8AM

--- I restored all guardian control and sent the ISI back to FULLY ISOLATED, and it went and is currently ok.

Current State:

- average winds at EY and EX and the Corner Station are now above 27mph according to LHO anemometers

- useism is slightly lower in the last 2 hours, end stations around 0.5 and Corner Station around 0.9

- IFO is struggling to get to CHECK IR

as of 14:34UTC X arm in red is locked and alignment is offloaded!

continuing on with the initial alignment.

winds at EX are about 25mph, and increasing.

winds at the Corner Station are about 10mph.

useism is unchanged from 2 hours ago.

ETMX ISI excessive motion seems to be gone for now.

Attached is a plot of the ETMX ISI as Stage2 ISO is engaged when I set guardian to FULLY_ISOLATED.

Winds at EX have returned and are an average of 27mph as of 11:56UTC.

Useism is still 0.6um/s and higher at all buildings.

I tried using guardian to engage stage2 ISO and for these conditions it looks like guardian has very agressive ramp times, so I looked for the ISI guardian that sets the ramp times without success, and engaged the stage2 ISO manually, with very long ramp times and graduated gains, but got the same result as the guardian's - ETMX is oscillating.

Title: Ops Owl Mid-shift report, shift times 08:00-16:00UTC (00:00-08:00PT)

State of H1: unlocked

Shift Summary:  Arriving on site, winds are good, useism is still high but trending down over the last 8 hours, ETMX ISI is oscillating

I'm working on ETMX ISI to stop the oscillations.  So far have taken it to OFFLINE and ran an INIT, and am now working on going back to FULLY_ISOLATED.

This may not work, but maybe it will.

Other than ETMX ISI, no other outstanding issues from heavy winds.

TITLE:  11/14 OWL Shift:  00:00-08:00UTC (16:00-00:00PDT), all times posted in UTC     

STATE of H1:  High winds continue (now averaging about 30mph).  LVEA useism is at 1.0um/s.  For locking, we need winds below 20mph and useism down to 0.7um/s.

Incoming Operator:  Cheryl Monitoring From Home

Support:  Talked with Mike on the phone.  Nutsinee was also here.

Quick Summary: 

Shift was awash, with no locking attempts at all due to high seismic activity which has been going on 24+hrs!  I have occupied an FOM screen (nuc0 & it can be view here) so Cheryl can monitor seismicity & ALS locking from home.  If the winds ever calm down during her shift, she will come in.  

Activities:

• Topped of Crystal Chiller
• 2:15 Nutsinee out of LVEA for HWS work
• Nutsinee noticed tripped TCS-X laser.  Talking with Mike/Alastair about fix
• 2:20 Taking HAM2, HAM5, & HAM6 ISIs to ISOLATED now that Nutsinee is done.  Mode Cleaner locked.  Waiting for TCSx to get sorted before working on alignment.
• Went out on floor to bring back TCSX (see Nutsinee's alog).
• Guardian was giving low ISS diffracted power, so made an adjustment to REFSIGNAL
• Attempted Initial Alignment but ALS locking not possible due to seismic.  ALS locks would last seconds to a couple of minutes before dropping out.

The first image attached is before the alignment work. The second image is after the alignment this afternoon (not quite there yet but looks much better) and the third image is the return beam with Hartmann plate on. The problem I ran into is that the return sled beam didn't seem to follow the path of the green light (I lost the return beam when I aligned green to the irises). 

Another episode of RF45 glitches came back 5 hours ago (Nov14 00:36 UTC) and still on going.

Alastair, Corey, Nutsinee

First RTD/IR sens. alarm went red on the medm screen. A visual inspection at the controller box showed IR FAULT alarm which couldn't be untripped by simply turn the key back and forth. Before going out to swap the IR sensor box I discovered that the laser had actually stopped working almost two hours before the alarm went off. Meaning, nothing was heating up the viewport at the time IR sensor tripped. We followed Alastair's suggestion (with a permission from Mike) and inspected the viewport from inside the table anyway to make sure there's nothing obvious (eg. bug crawed in and got zapped). While taking down the IR sensor box the sensor happened to untripped itself. So we swapped the DB9 cable and plug it to the spare IR box and left it on the chassis. After the IR fault got untripped we were able to restart the laser.

The cause of CO2X tripped is unclear. There was a sharp drop in power supply but only by a tiny amount (-0.005 V) at the same time that the laser output power, laser temperature, and the current drawn dropped to 0. All these happened almost two hours before IR FAULT alarm went off. The chiller was working fine.

NOISY SEISMIC:  This shift continues to have elevated wind (averaging about 25mph) and useism (Corner Station hovering at 1um/s).  Attached are screen shots of the useism, and the wind for the last 24hrs.  One can view the useism band here.

TCSX LASER BACK:  Nutsinee brought the TCSX laser back & that will probably take something on the order of an hour(s) to heat up ITMx.

INITIAL ALIGNMENT NOT POSSIBLE YET:  Also tried starting an initial alignment.  I was able to get the arms to lock up (Y-arm looked good & X-arm needed some ETMx tweaking), but they only stay locked on the order of seconds and then get bumped around by the wind and drop.  So this will make Initial Alignment tough:  Still too noisy for the arms.

I have all BSC ISIs on 45mHz Blends.

This is a continuation of the results reported in 23331 adding this time the Q measurements for the 2nd Harmonic of the violin modes for ITMX and ITMY suspensions. Based on the 10 hours of data from (UTC) 2015-11-04 06:35:00 to (UTC) 2015-11-04 16:15:00 when the damping filters for these harmonics were turned off.

I attach the spectrum of the 10 hours of data with resolution of 1mHz and 68 averages, in red are the peak frequencies identified here as 2nd harmonics for ITMX and ITMY and these are the ones I track here with a line tracker (iWave).

Attached are the summary plots for the line tracker locked modes; at the top is the frequency as a function of time and at the bottom is the Log of the amplitude as a function of time. A first order polynomial is fitted to Log(Amp) in order to obtain the Q of that mode.

In comparison with n 23331 this time we observe many more modes with a clear ringdown allowing for more accurate measurements of Q as shown next:

            Frequency                       Q                Delta_Q

   1.0e+09 *
   0.000000991746043   0.638343205424020   0.000149585967453
   0.000000991932780   0.988513060431184   0.000433659978759
   0.000000992424650                   0                   0
   0.000000992793647   1.544250594114285   0.000442769972986
   0.000000994277692   1.846260247611300   0.000357683597242
   0.000000994646171   1.429803598985770   0.001138277433661
   0.000000994733913                   0                   0
   0.000000994897934   1.363257521653677   0.000632572972344
   0.000000995365554   1.412623504284980   0.001169331947625
   0.000000995645184   1.427802427814187   0.000897711718659
   0.000000996250457                   0                   0
   0.000000996528556   1.051941151626503   0.000247088823712
   0.000000997717925                   0                   0
   0.000000997887934   1.367480640577778   0.000256968037986
   0.000000998664500                   0                   0
   0.000000998805575   1.414837156915169   0.000225767863446

useism is still hight 0.5-1.0 um/s & winds are still averaging over 20mph.

TCSX laser tripped this evening as well.  Nutsinee has been talking with Alastair & Mike about this.  I am going to go out on the floor with her as her "buddy" as she inspects and does work on table.  With this laser off, it takes an hour or two for the TCS to heat up ITMX once we get it back... so we'll be down for a while due to this (but we were already down due to obvious environmental issues.

While checking doors and turning off lights, I went ahead and topped off the Chiller.  I put in 170mL (NOTE:  Jeff topped it off yesterday to 250mL).

TITLE:  11/13 OWL Shift:  00:00-08:00UTC (16:00-00:00PDT), all times posted in UTC     

STATE of H1:  H1 is DOWN due to elevated winds & useism since last night's OWL shift.

Outgoing Operator:  TJ

Support:  

Quick Summary: 

Gusts up to 50+mph.  useism hovering around 0.7 um/s (must be atleast 0.5 to even think about locking...and this isn't even factoring wind.); useism has been at this value or higher for the last 22hrs!

While we are down, Nutsinee is doing Hartman Wavefront Sensor alignment out on the floor (TJ mentioned Landry approved this earlier).  I see that HAM2, HAM5, & HAM6 ISIs are in the DAMPED state.  Will transition back to ISOLATED when Nutsinee work complete.

I have turned off the violin mode damping filters for IX and IY by zeroing their gains. Patrick accepted these into SDF so that we can go to observing.

This is meant to be temporary, i.e., for this one lock only.

The next time the interferometer comes into lock, the Guardian will turn on the normal violin mode damping settings. These settings will appear as SDF diffs (two on IX, and six on IY). These should be accepted into SDF.

We do not expect these modes to ring up during the course of the lock. However, if the mode height on the control room DARM spectrum around 500 Hz rises above 10⁻¹⁶ m/rtHz, the damping should be turned back on:

1. Make sure the ramp times for the damping filter modules are at least a few seconds (currently they seem to be set to 10 s).
2. The filters should already be configured to provide the right damping phase, so changing the filters should not be necessary.
3. Start typing in gain settings. Refer to the values listed below. If the violin mode amplitude is much much higher than usual (e.g., it's off the scale on the control room DARM spectrum), it is wise to start with a small gain (e.g, gain of ±1) in order to make sure the suspension drive does not saturate. Then you can increase the gain in several steps, until the nominal setting is achieved.

A screenshot of the nominal IY damping settings is attached (I didn't take one for IX).

ITMX:

• MODE3 gain: −100
• MODE6 gain: +200
• all others zero

ITMY

• MODE1 gain: −200
• MODE2 gain: −200
• MODE3 gain: +100
• MODE4 gain: −50
• MODE5 gain: +400
• MODE6 gain: +50
• all others zero