1. Approval Processor now checks for SegDB overflows, looking for overflow flags 30 seconds prior to and 5 seconds after the event gpstime. The program waits 180 seconds before it performs these checks to ensure that the proper SegDB files have been copied to the emfollow machine. 2. We've doubled the far thresholds respectively for each pipeline.
Prompted by a plot I showed at todays JRPC call of the forest of narrow lines visible below 100 Hz in a typical daily FSscan normalized spectrum (based on a day's worth of 30-minute FFTs), Jeff asked me how much data one needs to see these lines when trying to investigate them. Below are some ldvw spectra from this week for a variety of total observation times and FFT coherence times, starting with long times and moving toward shorter times. From these spectra, I would say that 15 minutes of observing time with 1- or 5-minute FFTs could be adequate to see if a particular change has made the stronger lines go away completely, but one would need to go to longer times to quantify small relative changes in strength. To see weaker lines, one can go to longer observation times and longer coherence times (see last figure). Figures: 1 - 2 hours of 15-min FFTs 2 - 1 hour of 15-min FFTs 3 - 30 minutes of 15-min FFTs 4 - 30 minutes of 5-min FFTs 5 - 15 minutes of 5-min FFTs 6 - 15 minutes of 1-min FFTs 7 - 5 minutes of a 5-min FFT 8 - 5 minutes of 1-min FFTS 9 - 8 hours of 30-min FFTs
The IFO has been in Observing mode for the past 8 hours. Range has been between upper 70s to 80Mpc. Wind is calm to a light breeze (0 - 4mph). Seismic activity is quiet and well below 0.1um/s. Miscroseism has been building for the past 6 hours, but is starting flatten out at around 0.8um/s. There are storms along the North Pacific coast (data buoys reporting waves 12 to 16.5 feet, winds 22 to 37 knots, pressure at 29.2 inches and falling). There have been two ETM-Y saturations.
When looking at the optical lever diodes recently I noticed that the ITMX diode sum seemed to be dropping and rising very regularly, with a period of approximately 6 seconds. The attached image shows two minutes of data for the four indivual ITMX diode segments along with their sum. It was not obvious to my eyes that the four segments would add up to equal the sum (it seemed unlikely) but Keita added the four signals together and it did in fact result in the sum as we see it on the plots. So the sum channel is being added properly, however we still do not know why it is rising and dropping as it is. I looked at old data to try and see when this behavior started it and it looks like this has been happening for a long time. This pattern was visible in the data for all of 2015. It can be clearly seen in data back from January of this year. I did not see this behavior in the other optical lever diode channels.
Kyle and Gerardo now have the beam tube ion pump open to the tube. The pressure at XEND has fallen by ~ 1/2.
Two days shown on the plot.
Transition Summary:
Title: 12/03/2015, Evening Shift 16:00 – 00:00 (08:00 – 16:00) All times in UTC (PT)
State of H1: 08:00 (16:00), The IFO locked at NOMINAL_LOW_NOISE, 22.2w, 75Mpc.
Outgoing Operator: TJ
Quick Summary: IFO locked in Observing mode for the past 4 hours. Environmental conditions are mixed – wind is calm (0-3mph), seismic activity is quiet. Microseism has been intensifying for the past 4 hours, and is now at 0.8um/s.
Title: 12/3 OWL Shift: 08:00-16:00UTC (00:00-8:00PDT), all times posted in UTC
State of H1: Observing at 77 Mpc for 4 hours
Shift Summary: One lockloss from an unknown cause, the alignment was not good after so I had to run an initial alignment. After some fiddling with the green in IA, it went to NLN with no problems. Cruising since then.
Incoming Operator: Jeff B
Activity Log:
10:17 - Lockloss
Observing
Peter King arrived and couldn't log in so I tried my account on two different machines with no luck. LLO isn't having this issue so must be a local problem, but I don't think it should be related to the full file system.
As per TJ's note on some hard disc space being filled. The remote screens and control room shots are amiss. Having said that a number of the HEPI and ISI ones are still available, if that helps debug the issue.
I'm seeing signs very similar to last time this happened (alog23006).
I first noticed something was up when I couldn't get the Lockloss tool to work due to an IOError of no space left on drive, and then the Lock Clock died. The clock works similarly to the reservation system where it will repeatedly write a new file with the updated times and delete the old one, so when the system gets full it can't write a new one.
I have deleted some stuff in my folder in hopes that it would help, but I don't really have any large files that would make a big dent.
Operators: VerbalAlarms has also crashed because it cannot write its notifications. I started it up on the Alarm Handler computer without the "-w" option so it will still run for now, but none of its notifications are being recorded. Please stop this process and start a new one when the issue is fixed. Same startup as before, type "VerbalAlarms" into the AH computer terminal (the -w and -l options are already aliased in).
Back at 12:21 UTC. Had to run thourhg an initial alignment, where I struggled with locking ALSX. I couldn't seem to get the power above 0.5, similar to what Corey was going through on Nov 29 (alog23805). I'm not sure how I fixed it. I fiddled with the ETMX, ITMX, and a tiny bit of TMSX, but when the power suddenly shot up near 1.0 I swear it was at values that I had already passed through for all three.
Not sure of the cause yet. Control signal Striptools didn't show any signs of struggle. Seismic looks calm, no wind.
HEPI tidal seems to have been good (1st attachment).
Lockloss tool is failing due to "IOError: [Error 28] No space left on device"
Looks like I am going to have to do an initial alignment, pretty much everything seems very misaligned...odd.
Title: 12/3 OWL Shift: 08:00-16:00UTC (00:00-8:00PDT), all times posted in UTC
State of H1: Observing at 79Mpc for 31 hours
Outgoing Operator: Travis
Quick Summary: Wind < 15mph, useism 0.5 um/s, CW inj running. All seems calm.
Title: 12/2 Eve Shift 0:00-8:00 UTC (16:00-24:00 PST). All times in UTC.
State of H1: Observing
Shift Summary: Another very quiet shift. Only 4 ETMy saturations. Going on 31 hours of lock.
Incoming operator: TJ
Activity log:
0:45 Commissioning mode for Hugh to change HEPI limits (~1 min.)
0:49 Commissioning mode for Evan to change tidal limits (~1 min.)
Evan G, Travis S, Nutsinee K
Congratulations to the LISA Pathfinder team for the succesful launch today! The LHO and LLO control rooms both took part in a Google Hangouts interactive live-stream in the leadup and following the launch of LISA Pathfinder. Besides a few technical difficulties with Google Hangouts/YouTube, I think it was a nice experience. We were able to answer a few questions how LIGO and LISA are different, our current operational status, etc. We now look forward to the interesting scientific output from the mission!
Congratulations again! :)
Other than a brief excursion to Commissioning for updating HEPI drive limits (see aLog 23918), we have been locked in Observing for over 28 hours now. Congrats to the LISA Pathfinder mission for a successful launch.
In hopes to not lose the lock and with approval from MLandry, we increased the limits from 500 to 700um. These are the limits changed:
H1:HPI-ETMX_ISCINF_LONG_LIMIT
H1:HPI-ETMY_ISCINF_LONG_LIMIT
H1:LSC-X_TIDAL_CTRL_LIMIT &
H1:LSC-Y_TIDAL_CTRL_LIMIT
The post change trend looks like we may be out of the woods as the attached plot shows a turn over and the tide may pull us back. If we last another 6 to 12 hours, we'll really know something.
J. Kissel, S. Karki, B. Weaver, R. McCarthy, G. Merano, M. Landry After gathering the weekly charge measurements, I've compared H1 SUS ETMY ESD's relative Pitch/Yaw actuation strength change (as measued by the optical levers) against the Longitundinal Actuation Strength (as measured by PCAL / ESD calibration lines). As has been shown previously (see LHO aLOG 22903), the pitch/yaw strength's slope trends very nicely along with the longituinal stength change -- if you take a quick glance. Upon closer investigation, here are things that one begins to question: (1) We still don't understand why the optical level actuation strength assessments are offset from the longitunidal strength assessment after the ESD bias sign flip. (2) One *could* argue that, although prior to the flip the eye-ball-average of oplev measurements trackes the longitudinal strength, after the flip there are periods where two quadrants (magenta, in pitch, which is LR, from Oct 25 to Nov 8; black, in yaw, which is UR, from ~Nov 11 to Dec 06) track the longitudinal strength. As such, one *could* argue that the longitudinal actuation strength trend is dominated by a single quadrant's charge, instead of the average. Maybe. (3) If you squint, you *could* say that the longitudinal actuation strength increase rate is slowly tapering off, where as the optical lever strength increase *may* be remaining constant. One could probably also say that the rate of strength increase is different between oplevs and cal lines (oplev P/Y strength is increasing faster that cal line L strength). All this being said, we are still unsure whether we want to flip the ETMY ESD bias sign again before the observation run is out. Landry suggests we either do it mid-December (say the week of Dec 14), or not at all. So we'll continue to track via optical lever, and compare against the longitudinal estimate from cal lines. Results continue to look encouraging for ETMX -- ever since we've had great duty cycle, and turned off the ETMX ESD Bias when we're in low-noise and/or when the IFO is down, the charging rate has decreased. Even though the actuation strength of ETMX doesn't matter at the few % level like it does for ETMY (because ETMX is not used as the DARM actuator in nominal low-noise, so it doesn't affect the IFO calibration), it's still good to know that we can get an appreciable effect by simply reducing the bias voltage and/or turning it off for estended periods of time. This again argues for going the LLO route of decreasing the ETMY bias by a factor of 2, which we should certianly consider doing after O1. --------------- As usual, I've followed the instructions from the aWiki to take the measurements. I had much less trouble today than I had last week gathering data from NDS, which is encouraging. One thing I'd done differently was wait a litle longer before requesting the gathering and analysis (I waited until the *next* measurement had gone through -9.0 and -4.0 [V] bias voltage points and started the 0.0 [V] point, roughly 5 minutes after the measurement I wanted to analyze ended). As such, I was able to get 6 and 4 oplev data point to compose the average for ETMX and ETMY, respectively (as opposed to the 3 and 1 I got last week; see LHO aLOG 23717). Once all data was analyzed, I created the usual optical-lever-only assessment using /ligo/svncommon/SusSVN/sus/trunk/QUAD/Common/Scripts/Long_Trend.m and saved the data to here: /ligo/svncommon/CalSVN/aligocalibration/trunk/Runs/O1/H1/Results/CAL_PARAM/2015-12-01_H1SUSETMY_ChargeMeasResults.mat However, I'd asked Sudarshan to gather the latest calibration line estimates of the ESD longitudinal actuation strength (aka kappa_TST), which he gathered from his matlab tool that gathers the output of the GDS function "Standard Line Monitor." (He's promised me an updated procedure and an aLOG so that anyone can do it). This is noteably *not* the output of the GDS pipeline, but the answers should be equivalent. His data lives here: /ligo/svncommon/CalSVN/aligocalibration/trunk/Runs/O1/H1/Results/CAL_PARAM/2015-12-01_Sep-Oct-Nov_ALLKappas.mat Finally, I've made the comparison between oplev and cal live strength estimates using /ligo/svncommon/CalSVN/aligocalibration/trunk/Runs/O1/H1/Scripts/CAL_PARAM/compare_chargevskappaTST_20151201.m
J. Kissel, G. Merano, J. Worden In order to facilitate figuring out what's left on the chambers that might be charging the test masses (and also to compare against LLO who has a few bonkers quadrants that had suddenly gained charge), I attach a drawing (apologies for my out-of-date SolidWorks version) of what gauges remain around the end-station chambers. The "Inficon wide-range gauge" is the BPG402-Sx ATM to UHV Gauge, and the "Gauge Pair" are separate units merged together by LIGO. Also, PS -- we're valving in the ol' ion pumps today (in their new 250 [m]-from-the-test-masses locations). Kyle and Gerardo are valving in the X-arm today (stay tuned for details from them).
Not sure what Jeff meant by "ol' ion pumps". Kyle and Gerardo valved in a "bran' new ion pump" at the 250m location. The ol ion pump remains mounted in the end station but valved out from the chamber. Only the Xarm pump has been valved in at the 250 m location. The Yarm pump has yet to be baked prior to opening to the tube.
https://alog.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/aLOG/index.php?callRep=23916
Because the microseism is down to a level similar to what we saw over the summer, I asked Patrick to put the ISI's in the more wind tolerant 90 mhz blends. Wind is also low right now, but it can come up suddenly, while microseism takes days to rise. We also need more data about what conditions necessitate switching. After, Evan and Keita finished in the PSL, Patrick started relocking but was having troubles with the green. Fiddling the TMS alignments fixed it, I looked to see if the ISI positions had changed. They haven't moved but I found something interesting.
Most of the ISIs all showed a relatively smooth switch from the 45 to 90 blends except for ETMY. ITMY is the first plot and is pretty consistent with all the other chambers, except ETMY. Patrick switched the X&Y blends at the same time , in the middle of the time span I grabbed in the plot. You can kind of tell because the ITMY location mon range gets a little smaller and there are fewer low frequency swings on X&Y, due to the lower gain peaking at higher frequency of the 90 blend. The other DOFs don't seem to see anything.
ETMY however shows a huge 30 micron shift in the Y direction (second plot), and is visible in all DOFs. This chamber was only running the 45mhz blend in the Y DOF, so only the Y blend got switched on this chamber, at about 21:48 UTC today. No idea why it should be any different from the other chambers, although BrianL did note a while ago that the ETMY STS is poorly centered (maybe relevant because the STS is used for sensor correction, so gets summed with the CPS signal before the blend). It would be good to get some time to see if this is repeatable and truly limited to ETMY or not.
For some discussion about how to fix this, see the SEI log, entry 887. https://alog.ligo-la.caltech.edu/SEI/index.php?callRep=887 short answer - 1) SEI team needs to update the blend-switch code to wait longer during the switch process so that the transients can settle down. 2) don't try to change the blend filters while the Tidal-offload is pushing hard on HEPI - wait at least 200 seconds after it finishes. 3) SEI team needs to have less tilt on HEPI when it gets moved by the tidal offload.