Recent progress with the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer project

The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer is an ambitious project to build a 10 telescope long-baseline optical/near-infrared in the mountains about a one-hour drive outside of Socorro, NM. The project is being led by New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and being built in cooperation with our primary collaborators at the University of Cambridge. We are currently funded via a cooperative agreement with the Air Force Research Lab in Albuquerque, NM to demonstrate imaging capabilities on geosynchronous objects. We have recently installed the second full beamline for the interferometer system and are working our way towards first fringes on an ~8m baseline later this year. In this manuscript, we report on the status of each of the subsystems, the installation progress and challenges to date, and on the ramp-up to measurements of first fringes. We also report on plans for early science and offer public shared-risk access with the facility in the near future.