ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for February 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.  Finished SPENVIS simulations of particle environments in low- and high-Earth orbit.  Adding results to paper.

  ... Submitted abstract for summer AAS meeting on "The Effects of Orbital Environment on X-ray CCD Performance".


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  Engineering parameters remain nominal.

  ...  In anticipation of continued spacecraft heating, the ACIS team has agreed to increase yellow high limits on some temperatures.  Red limits are unchanged.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Procedures to upload flight software patch F-G-H are being prepared and tested.  The patch, an update to buscrash2, addresses Software Problem Reports 148 and 150.  (ftp://acis.mit.edu/pub/ACIS_Patch_F-G-H.pdf)

2.3 Instrument science performance

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

  ...  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).
 
  ...  Discussed ACIS particle background with user.  Rejection efficiency on-board and on the ground, types of particles responsible for the background during observations and particle spectrum.

3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Participated in planning discussions for the next IACHEC meeting (May 2014).  Began planning an agenda and confirming invited speakers.

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops ACIS response discussion group.  Discussed limits of the temperature-dependent CTI correction and CC-mode data analysis recommendations.

  ...  Reviewed proposed CXC calibration web page on ACIS background uniformity.

  ...  Continued review of recent paper which make claims about ACIS gain calibration accuracy.  (Sanders et al. arXiv:1401.3131)  Reported problems are not, as claimed, due to temperature variations but due to known anomalous gain variations on I0 and I2.

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

  ...  Reviewed final version of 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.