ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for July 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.  Preparing poster for August HEAD meeting on "The Effects of Orbital Environment on X-ray CCD Performance".

  ...  Began study of the time evolution of CTI temperature-dependence.  Temperature-dependent coefficient has changed for parallel CTI on BI CCDs while FI CCDs appear to be unchanged.  Results will be incorporated into potential CALDB products and into standard CTI monitoring scripts.

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

  ...  Finalizing plan for moving the ACIS Engineering Unit from NE80 to the new MIT CXC space in NE83.  Prepared slides on the move and post-move test plan for Move Readiness Review which took place July 30.  The move itself took place August 5.

  ...  Flight software patch F-G-H uploaded in June and has continued to run with no issues.

  ... Participated in discussion of whether observing efficiency could be increased by changing the ACIS bias algorithm.  The time gained would be very small as much of the time lost to biases is during spacecraft slews and unrecoverable.  Time gained does not justify such a major flight software project.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meetings.  Discussed thermal issues, upcoming Engineering Unit move, and turning off the Detector Housing heater.

  ...  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 and the proposed new contamination model (released July 9).

  ...  Prepared summary of IACHEC CCD Working Group activities for upcoming IACHEC newsletter.

  ...  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 and July.  Engineering Unit move will take place in early August.

  ...  Recovered from a dead CPU in ACIS monitoring computer.  Shuffled data to different disks due to early signs of disk failure.


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.