ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for November 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.  Added new figures and text.

  ... Clarified request to ACIS SOT scheduler to occasionally increase
  CTI observation exposure times to guarantee at least one >5 ksec
  observation each week.


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 upgrading the engineering unit and TST machines from SunOS to
  Solaris and eventually to Linux.

  ...  Continued email discussion from ACIS meeting on feasibility of
  turning the Detector Housing heater back on (possibly linked to
  increased contaminant deposition), and science impact of increasing
  the quantity of focal plane temperature deviations.

  ...  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 November.

  ...  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 ACIS response discussion group.

  ...  Answered SDS questions about time-evolution of bias-parity
  errors.  Well correlated with the solar cycle and other measures of
  the particle background.

  ...  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.  Had to restart filterServer and remount file systems.

  ...  Work continues on upgrading TST machines to Solaris and then
  Linux.


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