ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for March 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.  Quantifying cosmic ray rates in raw frames.  Some figure formatting improvements.

  ... 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.

  ...  Instrument team gave final approval to raising of yellow high limits for 1DPAMZT, 1DEAMZT, & 1DPAMYT.  Red limits are unchanged.

  ...  Released new version of memo on the Hi-Lo Pixel Anomaly and suggested future responses which could be executed to provide more diagnostic data.  (ftp://acis.mit.edu/pub/hi-lo-pixel-anomaly-v1.3.pdf)

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Reviewed draft flight software patch upload procedure for patch F-G-H.  The patch, an update to buscrash2, addresses Software Problem Reports 148 and 150.  (ftp://acis.mit.edu/pub/ACIS_Patch_F-G-H.pdf)

  ...  Participated in real-time commanding exercise dumping the ACIS flight software.  Reviewed CAP (#1309) and provided real-time support in the OCC.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  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 (May 2014).  Finalized agenda.  Participated in planning for contamination working group discussion.

  ...  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.  

  ...  Migration of MIT realtime telemetry software to Linux complete. Users are being checked out on the new setup.