ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for January 2014

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.  Based on co-author recommendation, doing proper SPENVIS simulations of the particle environments.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  Engineering parameters continue their nominal trends.  No untoward engineering events have arisen.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Reviewed CAP to run long duration CTI measurement after radiation shutdown.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  ACIS-triggered radiation shutdown occurred on January 7. Radiation levels were high and the trigger was desirable.

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meeting.  Discussed new thermal yellow limits, progress on the next flight software patch and recent anomaly memos.

  ...  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 limits of the temperature-dependent CTI correction and CC-mode data analysis recommendations.

  ...  Reviewed recent paper which make claims about ACIS gain calibration accuracy.  (Sanders et al. arXiv:1401.3131)  Unclear if problems are due to focal plane temperature, as claimed, or gain fluctuations on ACIS-I2.

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and flight data products.  

  ...  Reviewed proposed CXC calibration memo on the gory details of CC mode data analysis.


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.  

  ...  Migration of MIT realtime telemetry software to Linux nearly complete. Users are being checked out on the new setup.  Linux compatible Makefiles have been created.