January 12, 2010 – 10:50 am by
Steele Wotkyns

Lowell Observatory staff (shown here from left: Bill DeGroff, DCT Project Engineer and Byron Smith, DCT Project Manager), were on hand yesterday at Pulliam Airport to help oversee a carefully planned and executed turning over of the 16,000-lb. cell to hold Lowell’s Discovery Channel Telescope primary mirror.
This, the first big piece of the DCT to come here, is a crucial component of the telescope mount to arrive and undergo major work. It arrived with the dummy mirror or simulator on December 23 in Flagstaff. On Monday, a three-person crew from Precision Heavy Haul led by Jim Mussman, turned over the M1 cell (shown in progress in this first photo) using two huge cranes working in tandem. Then, an approximately 7,000-lb. steel structure to simulate the DCT primary mirror in testing was also turned over and carefully placed on jacks atop the M1 cell. In a final phase of the operation, the entire assembly was moved back into a hangar that Lowell Observatory is renting from the City of Flagstaff.
“I think Precision Heavy Haul was very efficient,” said DeGroff. “They spent a lot of time prior to coming up here to understand the job. There was a lot of coordination up front (between Lowell engineers, BEC Southwest’s Kevin Bond, and Precision Heavy Haul).”
Lowell is working with a number of contractors and subcontractors that are Arizona and Flagstaff based. That was evident with the operation on Monday morning since in addition to Phoenix-based Precision Heavy Haul, there were staff from BEC Southwest on hand. Other Arizona companies involved in the making of Lowell’s new 4-meter-class research telescope include M3 Architects; the University of Arizona’s College of Optical Sciences; Laron, Inc.; Mosher Communications; Connect Tech; and others. Shown in the bottom image is Marc Daniels from BEC Southwest during an interview with Channel 12 (NBC).
See also: Arizona Daily Sun feature, More than flipping a pancake
and, a Daily Sun slide show, Discovery Channel Telescope
DCT slide show on the M1 cell and related integration operations
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