Submitted by jelias on Tue, 2018-11-20 21:51
Updated, Nov. 28, 2018
This is a brief summary of the SOAR aluminizing shutdown. The purpose of the shutdown was to re-coat the secondary (M2) and tertiary (M3) mirrors, which together account for approximately 2/3 of the reflectivity loss since the last aluminization in late 2009. We did not get satisfactory results on our tests in preparation for doing the primary mirror, so we are not re-coating that mirror at this time.
This reduced the length of the planned shutdown, so we were able to return approximately 3 weeks of scheduled shutdown for science use.
