Maintaining the Southern African Large Telescope

SALT is a 10-m class optical telescope located in Sutherland, South Africa and has been in operations for almost 20 years. SALT has a small team of engineers and technicians who work in concert with astronomers to maintain, enhance and operate instruments and equipment. While asset renewal is key to keeping the telescope running, it is often challenging to remain up to date with the maintenance and asset renewal programs when you operate with limited resources due to high staff turnover. It has been an exhausting time for the team due to breakdowns of some of the sub-systems. One key performance metric of the telescope is telescope downtime which needs to remain below five percent. We are very fortunate to have a team that works well together to ensure systems are operational in as short a time as possible. However, due to the high staff turnover, knowledge is lost, and new staff take time to understand the various systems. Planning asset renewal projects is challenging when key staff are involved with some of the more complex problem-solving tasks. Documentation and drawings for some of these systems are incomplete, which has an impact on efficiency and maintenance of the telescope. This has happened due to ineffective, or outdated, processes. Gathering information about the telescope requires a considerable amount of time from the team. We decided that the only way to overcome these challenges is by creating special campaigns to improve our processes and maintenance plans, and to determine the resource requirements at SALT.