ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for April 2012

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)

  ...  Added new web page for monitoring of overclock levels.
(http://space.mit.edu/~cgrant/oc)

  ...  Continued work on a paper combining CTI, FWHM and background
  monitoring results from ACIS and Suzaku.  Continued writing text for
  nearly completed A&A paper.

  ...  Presented ACIS status at Chandra Quarterly Review.

  ...  Provided estimates of count rates in currently rejected
  grades.  It is now possible to include more grades in ECS
  observations without telemetry saturation.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  A
  review of the past two months of engineering data reveals no
  unexpected trends.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meeting.  Topics
  included the status of the TXINGs patch and thermal issues.

  ...  Reviewed commands for a modified ACIS undercover SI mode.

  ...  Continued work optimizing the parameters for the TXINGS patch.
  Presented plan to FDB to upload optimal txings parameters.

  ...  Attended FOT FSW meeting to coordinate the OBC's response to
  ACIS radiation triggers.

  ...  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

  ...  Participated in planning discussions for the next IACHEC
  meeting (spring 2013).

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops modeling discussion group.
  Discussed CC mode calibration (nearly finished), contamination
  measurements, and gain issues at low energies on S1.

  ...  Answered SDS questions about an anomalous ObsID from 1999.

  ...  Answered SDS questions about gradients in the delta overclocks
  at the beginnings of observations.

  ...  Answered SDS questions about vertical and horizontal strings of
  events.

  ...  Provided advice on focal plane temperature limits in standard
  processing.

  ...  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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