ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for December 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)

  ...  Ran an additional mid-month check of ACIS CTI after a strong
solar storm in December.  No change was detected to 1e-6 or 0.6%.

  ...  Continued work on memo for the operations team on the 
consequences of a future, unprotected radiation belt transit by ACIS.  
Received last comments on (nearly) final version and began incorporating.
Should be widely released in January.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  The SCS107 trigger on December 13 caused the ACIS BEP to reboot
leaving ACIS running flight SW version 11 (no patches).  A real-time
CAP was executed on December 14 which successfully reloaded the patches, 
warm booted and restarted DEA housekeeping.  This is the second
occurence of this anomaly and only occurs when SCS107 is commanded
within 600 seconds of a startScience and ACIS is computing bias.

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

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

2.2 Flight software maintenance

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  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.

2.5 Participate in Chandra activities

  ...  Supported execution of CAP 1023 to recover after BEP reboot.


3.  CXC Support

3.1 Provide user support

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

3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  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