QUESTION:
What was wrong with the telescope?

ANSWER from Juan Rivera on May 12:
The oscillating secondary mirror wiring problem has been fixed and everything
looks good.  The OSM chassis was moved to another place in the console to make
room for the computer work station I am now typing on.  In order to move the
OSM chassis the interconnecting cabling had to be replaced with new wiring.
The new wiring had several bad splices which were occasionally opening up
causing intermittent problems.

Later Juan also wrote:
> What was wrong with the telescope? <
Hmm...  Which time?  I should explain.  You see, on these
deployments where we work 6 days a week and I have all sorts of funny
hours, ofter times I don't even know what day it is, let alone remember
what happened several days ago.  Anyway, this is an example.  I can't
remember anything in particular that was wrong with it.  The telescope
and the equipment that controls it is like an old family car that wheezes
along and coughs and sputters when it's cold.  It's not perfect, but it's
ours and it's paid for!  There are always little things that come up
so often that I really don't remember them afterwards or even consider
them to be problems necessarly.  My job is to make sure everything works
during a flight and I just take it one problem at a time.  As an old
boss of mine used to say, "There are no problems - only solutions."
The sort of thing that often happens is that something is not making a
good connection inone of the pieces of equipment that control the telescope.
Usually figuring out what exactly is not working and then wiggling that
particular circuit board will fix it.  You see, the equipment gets quite
a beating from all the different climates we work in - one month in the
tropics, then next at home.  One minute it's on the ground and baking in
the sun, the next it's -50 and it's at 41,000 feet...  That is hard on
everything.  Then when you jiggle it all night and bounce it around when
the plane lands...  Well, you can see how things can get messed up.

The other thing that can happen when we put a different experiment on
the telescope is that it is not adjusted exactly right for the new
mass of their dewar.  This can cause the pointing of the telescope to be
less than perfect.  It will not stay exactly pointed at the star, or
whatever object they are looking at.  If it is wiggling around like that
then the quality of their data will be degraded.  Often times I can
improve it by adjusting the equipment in flight.  Sometimes It's just
a very small "tweak" that is needed.  I did that last flight.  The
computer system said that I had actually made things a little bit worse,
but the experimenters said it was a lot better.  So everyone was happy
I did it.  It takes some practice to do this particular adjustment.  When
I first started working on this project the engineers would set everything up on
the ground and we were not allowed to touch it.  But I was able to come
up with a better way to do it in flight and convinced everyone that I could
improve the pointing accuracy and stability of the telescope.  Now it's
routine.  Back then it was a big deal.  That's progress.