  We report on the current operating status of the ROTSE-IIIa telescope,
currently undergoing testing at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico.
It will be shipped to Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, in first quarter
2002. ROTSE-IIIa has been in automated observing mode since early October,
2001, after completing several weeks of calibration and check-out observations.
Calibrated lists of objects in ROTSE-IIIa sky patrol data are produced
routinely in an automated pipeline, and we are currently automating analysis
procedures to compile these lists, eliminate false detections, and
automatically identify transient and variable objects. The manual application
of these procedures has already led to the detection of a nova that rose over
six magnitudes in two days to a maximum detected brightness of m_R~13.9 and
then faded two magnitudes in two weeks. We also readily identify variable
stars, includings those suspected to be variables from the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey. We report on our system to allow public monitoring of the telescope
operational status in real time over the WWW.
