Commissioning, Testing and Latest Advancements toward the Cosmic Ray Energy Spectrum from IceAct at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the geographic South Pole, is presently using several detector components to study cosmic rays across a wide energy range. This contribution will focus on IceCube's IceAct Imaging Air Cherenkov telescopes, each of which features a 61 pixel camera with a 12 degree field of view and is designed and tested to withstand the harsh polar environment. The IceAct telescopes detect Cherenkov light produced by high energy cosmic ray particles interacting inside the atmosphere, which is complementary to the measurement of the air shower at the surface by IceTop and the high-energy muons in the deep ice. Two IceAct telescopes have been taking data since 2019 with a conservative estimated duty cycle of around 10%, and several additional telescopes were deployed in the latest South Pole season. A graph neural network is used to reconstruct the basic air shower properties, including geometry and primary energy. This contribution will provide an overview of IceAct including the design, the pre-deployment testing procedures, the on-site alignment calibration, and the current progress toward analyzing the energy spectrum and composition of cosmic rays using IceAct data in combination with data from other subdetectors of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.