TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 32325 SUBJECT: GRB220701A: VIRT Optical Upper Limit DATE: 22/07/05 17:51:12 GMT FROM: Priyadarshini Gokuldass at U. of the Virgin Islands P. Gokuldass (Florida Institute of Technology), N. Orange (OrangeWave Innovative Science, LLC), K. Noonan (UVI), R. Querrard (UVI), K. Smith (UVI), D. Morris (UVI) report: We observed the field of GRB220701A (Evans et al., GCN 32306) with the 0.5m Virgin Island Robotic Telescope (VIRT) at the University of the Virgin Islands' Etelman Observatory on 07-01-2022 starting at 05:16:18.64 UT (T+24 min). We performed a series of exposures in the R filter with a total exposure of 3300 s. The weather conditions were partly cloudy during the hours of observation with an average airmass of 2. We detect no new source within the enhanced XRT position error circle (Evans et al., 32308), consistent with other non-detections (Zheng et al. GCN 32307; O'Connor et al. GCN 32309; Oates et al. GCN 32310; Hu et al. GCN 32311; Strausbaugh et al. GCN 32313; Belkin et al. GCN 32317) and report the following 5-sigma upper limit: T_mid ||Exposure ||Filter ||Limit T+ 1.5 hrs ||3300s ||R ||>19.8 The limit is estimated from comparison to nearby USNO B1 stars and is not corrected for Galactic extinction. The VIRT is still in the commissioning phase. We acknowledge financial support from NASA MUREP MIRO award 80NSSC21M0001, NASA EPSCoR award 80NSSC19M0060, and NSF EiR award 1901296.This message can be cited.