ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for June 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)

  ...  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.  Trying to better quantify the
  systematic errors in fitting Gaussians to intrinsically non-Gaussian lines.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.
  ACIS continues to perform nominally.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meeting.  Topics
  included the now active TXINGs patch and how to monitor threshold
  crossing rates from the ground and thermal issues.

  ...  Both ACIS and the Chandra OBC are now ready to respond to a
  radiation trigger from the TXINGs patch.  Changing particle
  background will require revisiting the patch parameters a few times
  a year.  Working on how to provide threshold crossing plots and data
  automatically for ground assessment during radiation events.

  ...  Two proceedings papers on the TXINGS patch were submitted to
  the SPIE Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2012: Ultraviolet to
  Gamma Ray conference by P. Ford and C. Grant.

  ...  Participated in radiation working group telecon.

  ...  Reviewed parameter blocks for new CTI modes which will change
  the grade filtering to only reject g255.

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

  ...  Answered SDS question regarding CTI temperature dependence.

  ...  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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