This month, members of the IAC engineering team visited the LJMU NRT project office in Liverpool.

Horacio Rodríguez and Fran Márquez from IAC spent two days in technical meetings with the LJMU NRT project team which was the first in person technical meeting between both groups since the new IAC team members started on the project. Therefore, there was a lot to cover in just two days. The main topics were;

- Engineering work package status and planning

- Control architecture status and development

- Optical analysis status and next steps

The team were given a tour of the LJMU NRT/LT offices and lab space which included instrument development facilities (dark room and clean room) where Chloe Miossec gave an overview of the telescope beam simulator and her work on the NRT wave front sensor. Adam Garner showed the NRT model telescope and the LT lego telescope model (which is always a highlight for visitors to the NRT office!).

A particular focus was on the control hardware that Adam has been developing over the last few years which forms part of the focal station system. This includes a working scaled prototype version of the rotator system and the fold mirror mechanism (instrument selection mechanism). These systems use PLCs to drive motors and actuators as part of the NRT control network. This is of particular interest to the IAC team who hope to replaicate some of the control methods used to begin prototyping worth using their own PLC systems.