Following the successful re-integration and testing of RSS at SALT, it was finally installed on the telescope on 9 April 2011. During the period of SALT's engineering stand-down to address its image quality problems, the spectrograph optics were modified in order to address an issue of diminished throughput, particularly in the UV/blue region. At the same time some improvements were also made to the reliability of the many mechanisms controlling the instrument.

On-sky re-commissioning observations then began on 11 April, directed by the RSS Principal Investigator, Ken Nordsieck, assisted by the SALT operations personnel. Some of the initial observations were to verify basic instrumement performance (imaging characteristics, spectral performance, control systems). One of the first images taken was of the southern globular cluster, ω Cen, which is shown below. This has been followed by observations of a number of team commissioning programs and more recently, programs from the SALT community aimed at verifying the instrument's performance.