ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for November 2006

1.  ACIS Characterization

1.3 Monitor scientific on-orbit performance of ACIS

  ...  Continued monitoring of ACIS CTI, gain, trailing pixel 
pulseheight, detector efficiency, corner pixel distribution, and 
spectral line centroid and width. Updated monitoring web pages.  
(http://space.mit.edu/~cgrant/monitor.html)

  ...  Continued work on memo for the operations team on the 
consequences of a future, unprotected radiation belt transit by ACIS.  
Received final inputs quantifying the magnitude of temporal variations.
Released (nearly) final version.  Incorporating a few more comments.
Will hopefully be widely released in December/January.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.
ACIS engineering parameters remain nominal.

  ...  Reviewed FOT PSMC thermal model.  Used this model to determine
a margin for mission planning temperature limits.

  ...  Lowered some yellow low temperature limits in response to
the new FEP power-down paradigm.

  ...  Listened in on thermal working group community briefing.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in "monthly" ACIS operations meetings.  Discussed
final report on 10 video board housekeeping diagnostic run, thermal
issues, relevance of the Suzaku XIS 2 anomaly to ACIS.

  ...  Continued daily quick-look processing of ACIS telemetry and 
maintained Web interface to ACIS real-time data.

  ...  Continued to publish the "annotated DOT" timeline reports.

  ...  New power commands which power-down unused FEPs propagated
into the ACIS tables.


3.  CXC Support

3.1 Provide user support

  ...  Updated ACIS memo listing calibration ObsIDs and observation
characteristics (ACIS Memo #165).

  ...  Reviewed and commented on Cycle 9 Proposers' Observatory Guide.

3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops modelling discussion group.  
Discussed updating the contamination model and setting priorities
for future tasks.

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and 
flight data products.

4.  OCC Support

4.1 Use of MIT/ACIS EGSE at OCC

  ...  Continued support and maintenance of ACIS EGSE software and 
hardware at the OCC.

  ...  Continued work on improving configuration management of the ACIS
workstations in the TST area of the Chandra OCC.  Work nearly complete.


Outreach:

None

all recent memos available at http://space.mit.edu/ACIS/iacis.html