With the arm being a single-point of failure for the mission (arm fails, mission fails) most of our testing is done with the RA. As TEGA, SSI and RAC were all built here at UA, the teams are close and so we do a lot of testing on those instruments too. MECA was built by JPL, and so far the testing hasn't been very vigorous. Recently, we have starting doing a lot more MECA verification. The first round of major testing was nailing down the Optical Microscope (OM) focus position. During the ORT we did get some OM images, but they were not in focus. A couple of the MECA team members came up to work with the RA team during its testing of sample delivery to MECA. In conjunction, they did additional testing, by moving the lens closer and further from the sample until we attained in-focus pictures. Our Engineering Model (EM) is different from the Flight Model (FM), so the positions won't be the exactly the same, but they'll be close, and we now know how to find the position and what the images should look like.

Yesterday we ran a 12 HOUR TEGA test in preparation for a run on the FM this weekend. I'll let you know the details and how the tests went next week after thr run on the spacecraft.

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