ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for October 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.  Doing more detailed
  quantitative comparisons of ACIS and XIS particle backgrounds.

  ...  Collected new raw frames and updated monitoring web page.
(http://space.mit.edu/~fergason/acis/raw.html)

  ...  Updated web page examining bias data before and after Crab
  observations to include the past years worth of data.  No changes
  observed.


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

  ...  Investigating upgrading Engineering Unit to Solaris and/or Linux.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meeting.  Discussion
  included thermal issues, both ACIS and the spacecraft in general and
  upgrading the engineering unit and TST machines from SunOS to
  Solaris and eventually hopefully to Linux.

  ...  Remotely attended yearly Chandra thermal briefing.

  ...  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 radiation
  shutdowns in October.

  ...  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 ACIS response discussion group.
  Discussed contamination modeling and new time-dependent QEU maps.

  ...  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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