MIRSI News

March 22, 2018

MIRSI is currently in the lab in Hilo. We are working on ways to decrease the array temperature, having found several issues with the as-built cooling system. We are also replacing the array cabling and upgrading other aspects of the internal wiring and temperature sensors. The next cool down will show how cold the array can get without any electrical isolation. After that, the aluminum oxide electrical isolation will be put in to test the array temperature with the array's simulated heat load and with electrical isolation.

Sept 1, 2021

MIRSI is cold and on the telescope. We just did the first cold head exchange, and replaced the motor on the second filter wheel. On-sky testing last night (the first time we used MIRSI since it was put back together) verified the basic functionality of MIRSI, but the weather precluded tests of sensitivity. The current sensitivity is described in the 2022A Call for Proposals document. MOC (the MIRSI Optical Camera, a clone of MORIS) has been installed onto MIRSI as well but has not yet been tested. The next steps are to test correlated double sampling readout, and test MOC. Ultimately, we plan to replace the current engineering grade array with a science grade array.