ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for September 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 and writing on paper continuing.

  ...  Ran one more ECS measurements at warmer focal plane temperatures (-110C).  Data will be combined with measurements from July and August.  Plan to continue occasional warm observations.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  All systems continue to perform nominally with no unusual trends.

  ...  Approved raising the 1DPAMZT planning limit from +31.5C to +33.0C (still well below the yellow high limit of +35.0C)

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Engineering Unit currently running on a reasonably modern Solaris workstation.  Sucessfully completed testing of a Linux interface to the EU.  Making plans for purchase of identical backup EU Linux machines.
 
2.3 Instrument science performance

  ... Participated in meeting on detailed modelling of the migration of ACIS contamination by Steve O'Dell and Doug Swartz.  Ouput from this model could potential inform decisions on turning the Detector Housing heater back on, and, in the long-term, whether an ACIS bakeout would be successful at removing contaminant.

  ...  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 2014 in NE U.S.)

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops ACIS response discussion group.  Discussed CC mode calibration and converging on a contamination model for release.

  ...  Participated in discussions on how best to verify results of the temperature-dependent CTI correction, given the potential of increased warmer focal plane temperatures in the future.

  ...  Provided list of gratings observations with warmer focal plane temperatures for checks of the temperature-dependent CTI correction.

  ...  Answered SDS question on the default active area in continuous clocking mode.

  ...  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.  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.  Planning purchase of primary and backup Linux machines to replace EGSE hardware at the OCC.