ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for June 2013

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.  Final edits on paper continuing.  Updated data set to include Suzaku data at higher charge injection level and the most recent ACIS data.

  ...  Reviewed SOP to run new warm ECS measurements.  Two measurements planned for July at -115C and -110C.  Results will be compared to previous warm tests in 2005 and 1999.

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

  ...  Engineering Unit currently running on a reasonably modern Solaris workstation.  Software has been tested under 64-bit CentOS.  USB-to-LRCTU serial interface is installed and ready to be tested.  The PCI-to-Image Loader parallel interface is under development, awaiting manufacturer's modifications.
 
  ...  Successfully produced the trickle-bias anomaly (TBA) on the engineering unit.  Most likely cause of TBA involves the use of multiple inter-process semaphores by the BEP's operating system.  Confirmed that a simple change of the buscrash2 patch eliminates TBAs entirely.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ... Participated in monthly ACIS operations meetings.  Discussed status of the Linux porting, simulating trickle bias anomalies on the engineering unit and work on improving the txings algorithm.

  ...  Participated in radiation working group telecon.  Presented mission history of ACIS CTI as part of discussion of ACE P3 proton budget.

  ...  Re-examining the TXINGs triggering algorithm.  Fully tested a wide range of parameters and adjustments to make the algorithm more sensitive, also tested triggering on decreasing rates.  Improved algorithm is only marginally better than the current version.  A descending algorithm adds one or two new 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 CXC Cal/Ops ACIS response discussion group.  Discussed contamination analysis, CC mode calibration and proposal for new warm ECS measurements.

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and flight data products.  Primary backup machine for ACIS ECS eventlists required a replacement RAID controller card.


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.  Plan for broken EGSE backup machine is to do nothing for now, but proceed with upgrades to Linux.

  ...  Migration of MIT realtime telemetry software to Linux continues.  All MIT software currently running on HEAD hosts is compatible with 64-bit CentOS Linux.  All TST display software has been tested under 64-bit CentOS, except for the COG capture code.  Existing TST workstations will be replaced with 64-bit CentOS once the EU interface is fully operational.