ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for December 2011

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,
  spectral line centroid and width, and focal plane temperature.
  Updated monitoring web pages.
  (http://space.mit.edu/~cgrant/monitor.html)

  ...  Continued work on a paper combining CTI, FWHM and background
  monitoring results from ACIS and Suzaku.  Continued writing text for
  A&A paper.  Examined ACIS data taken at -90C in 1999 and 2005 to
  compare to data taken at -120C to help quanitfy the variability of
  CTI evolution due to focal plane temperature.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  A
  review of the engineering data for the past 2 months indicates no
  anomalous trends.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Submitted two abstracts for upcoming SPIE meeting on the ACIS
  radiation monitor patch.  One on better understanding the efficiency
  of the algorithm as a function particle flux and spectrum and one on
  the details of the algorithm and it's functioning.

  ...  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

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

3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Upon request, reviewed wording of CXC web pages on ACIS-S4
  streaks.

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops modeling discussion group.

  ...  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.



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