ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for May 2009

1.  ACIS Characterization

1.1 Characterize and model radiation damage in ACIS CCDs

  ...  Continued work on irradiation/annealing tests done at GSFC
in 2005.  Finalizing analysis.

  ...  Began considering whether previous work done for memo on
the consequences of a future, unprotected radiation belt transit
by ACIS, would be useful for better estimating damage from future, 
unprotected solar events.

1.3 Monitor scientific on-orbit performance of ACIS

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


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance. 
ACIS engineering parameters continue to fall within nominal bounds.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in radiation working group telecon discussing
the radiation environment during perigee as the Chandra orbit changes.

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meetings.  Discussed
upcoming power outage at 1 Hampshire and monitoring of temperature
and background since the reduction in the radiation belt backoff
time.

  ...  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.


3.  CXC Support

3.1 Provide user support

  ...  Provided information on ACIS particle background rates for
IXO team member.

  ...  Answered user question on dead time due to saturated telemetry
during ECS data and solved data retrieval problem.

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

3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops modeling discussion group.  Discussed
proposed update to the ACIS contamination model.

  ...  Participated in additional telecon on ACIS contamination CALDB
update.

  ...  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.


Outreach:

none this month

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