ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for August 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.  Draft is being reviewed by
  co-authors.

  ...  Requested new raw frames for periodic monitoring.

2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

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

2.2 Flight software maintenance


2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meeting.  Discussion
  included ACIS team response to anomalies in the case of key
  personnel being unavailable.

  ...  Additional MIT ACIS team members (re)trained on running the MIT
  telemetry pipeline and associated data processing tools.  Updated
  and improved documentation on the pipeline, troubleshooting and
  general anomaly response. 

  ...  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.  Waiting for first ACIS triggered shutdown - no significant
  solar events in August.

  ...  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), time-dependent QEU
  maps, and gain issues at low energies on S1.

  ...  Answered SOT question about bad columns for future E0102
  observation planning.

  ...  Answered Cal question about anomalous hot pixels in an ACIS
  background observation.  Caused by a feature in the bias map.
  Recommended repairing the bias map and reprocessing.

  ...  Investigated bias map anomaly.  Determined it was caused by
  extremely bright X-ray source.  Bias map repaired, observers notified.

  ...  Answered PSU instrument team member's questions on
  time-dependence of QEU maps due to changing CTI and on the shape of
  CTI evolution.

  ...  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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