Currently the echelle spectrometer is in a very long 20 hour observation block. Most of this time there is no telemetry contact due to the release of the Wake Shield Facility, which was deployed about 1 hour ago. The echelle spectrometer is operating in an autonomous mode. Quicklook data will be dumped to ground station after telemetry contact is up again. Aligment procedures were sucessfully completed early today.
All instruments perform well.
A first 4 hour observation block with the echelle spectrometer was used for checkout of the instrument. First estimates of the resolution of the echelle spectrograph indicate a spectral resolution of better than 9400. A first estimate of the echelle sensitivity shows, that the sensitivity of the echelle spectrograph is about a factor of 2 less than expected. This deviation is not very surprising, as the expected sensitivity was calculated from single measurements of the five optical elements involved. Echelle detector was switched on and shows good performance.