ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for June 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.  Editing.

  ...  Attended and presented poster at June AAS meeting on "The Effects of Orbital Environment on X-ray CCD Performance".

  ...  Attended and presented poster at SPIE meeting on "Fifteen Years of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer".  Submitted proceedings paper.


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

  ...  Working on plan for moving the ACIS Engineering Unit from NE80 to the new MIT CXC space in NE83.  Move Readiness Review scheduled for July 31, to be followed by a briefing to the Chandra FDB.  Developing test scripts to verify ACIS EU hardware performance before and after the move.  The move itself will take place in August.

  ...  Final procedures for upload of flight software patch F-G-H completed and reviewed.  The patch, an update to buscrash2, addresses Software Problem Reports 148 and 150.  Procedures were presented for approval by the FDB and uploaded on June 11.  (ftp://acis.mit.edu/pub/ACIS_Patch_F-G-H.pdf)

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Observation of bright X-ray binary Ser X-1 (ObsID 16208) had very high threshold crossing rates above the TXINGS radiation monitor trigger level.  TXINGS correctly did not trigger a radiation shutdown, due to the requirement for rates to be monotonically increasing by a certain amount.  TXINGS performed as it should.

  ...  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).
 
  ...  Answered SDS questions (from a user) about calibration of CTI correction at -110C.

3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and flight data products.
  
  ...  Office move of equipment and personel from NE80 to NE83 took place in June.  Engineering Unit move will take place later, in August.

  ...  Fixed problems with backup of ACIS monitoring computer.

  ...  Recovered from a dead CPU in a different ACIS monitoring computer.


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.