ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for April 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.  Adding more details on particle environment modeling.

  ...  Presentation on ACIS status and upcoming Engineering Unit building move for the Chandra Quarterly review.

  ...  Collected new raw frames, will be analyzed in May.

  ...  Reviewing results of evaluation of temperature-dependent CTI correction.  Generally pretty good, with some issues at high rows and higher energies.

2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

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

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Developing plan for moving the ACIS Engineering Unit from NE80 to the new MIT CXC space in NE83.  Initial plans presented at Chandra Quarterly Review.  A pre-move readiness review will be scheduled closer to the actual move date (currently August), to be followed by a briefing to the Chandra FDB.

  ...  Flight software patch F-G-H presented to the Chandra FDB.  Reviewing SOT proceedures draft.  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 meetings.  Discussed next flight software patch, thermal issues, the MIT building move and a new spreadsheet for the status of ACIS real-time SOPs.

  ...  Creating a spreadsheet of all ACIS real-time Standard Operating Procedures for the entire Chandra mission.  Evaluating which would be useful going forward and which can be safely retired.

  ...  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.  Reviewed a study of the temperature-dependent CTI correction, issues with contamination calibration, etc.

  ...  Finalizing organizational issues for the next IACHEC meeting (May 2014).  Confirming CCD/background working group presentation schedule.

  ...  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.