Facility Testing

Facility testing has been going on this week as we establish a baseline for the performance of the system in years to come. Our overnight tests of the drift rate are now coming out at less than 3 proton Hz per hour! All of the multi-dimensional protein data that we collected on Ubiquitin is looking great and we can't wait to see some results from a more challenging sample. We have also been able to improve remote access through the campus network so that it will be easier for users to log-in and get their data from afar. The coming months should prove to be very exciting!

Next Phase

Well this week we have been finishing all of the tests with Varian. Monday the spectrometer will be handed over to us to begin our facility tests. We have established a stringent series of experiments that will give us a clear idea of how the spectrometer is functioning so that if there ever are any problems down the line we can easily run the comparisons. We still have a few issues that have not yet been settled with Varian so negotiations are ongoing, but we can continue progress while that goes on. As we get closer to opening up to users we are looking out for ways to make the facility even better. As always we welcome questions and comments!

Return of the probe

The probe is back now and we will be testing it thoroughly over the next few days. They could find nothing wrong with it back in Palo Alto, so we'll see if anything has been fixed at all. We've used the lull to complete a few updates to the facility, in particular installing the UPS to power the console. In a test we performed last week with the console idle the UPS supported the power usage for 3 hours without line power. This is well in excess of what should be required for the system, as all of the power is backed up by the campus emergency generator. We had an actual test of the power back-ups this weekend as we had a brief power outage Sunday morning. Apart from calling me in to check on things the system weathered the outage without any problem.

Some bad news

During one of the installations tests we encountered a slight problem with the probe. We are sending it back to be checked-up and should only be down for a couple of days. We'd rather have this happen now than further down the line. Other than that the tests are still progressing well, we've only uncovered a few minor concerns so far.