ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for August 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).  Redistributed eventlist archive between two disks due to size limitations.  Adjusted monitoring scripts accordingly.  Added framestore CTI estimate to monitoring scripts.  Added time-dependence to temperature correction of CTI on S3.  Upgraded OS on primary monitoring computer.

  ...  Continued work on a paper combining CTI, FWHM and background monitoring results from ACIS and Suzaku.  Editing.  Presented poster at August HEAD meeting on "The Effects of Orbital Environment on X-ray CCD Performance".

  ...  Continued 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.  Uncovered other potential issues in spatial-structure and energy-dependence of CTI correction.  Results and plan for CALDB improvements presented at ACIS calibration meeting.

2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

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

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Move of the ACIS Engineering Unit and its peripherals from NE80 to the new MIT CXC space in NE83 took place August 5.  Testing uncovered no anomalies and the EU was back up for parameter block generation in less than two days.  Memo on the specific regression tests is here: ftp://acis.mit.edu/pub/acis-eu-regression-v1.1.pdf

  ...  Flight software patch F-G-H (improved buscrash2) uploaded in June and has continued to run with no issues.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meetings.  Discussed upcoming Engineering Unit move, the planned test of the DH heater in September, and developing a CAP to better diagnose video board and FEP anomalies.

  ...  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

  ...  Reviewed summary of IACHEC Contamination Working Group activities for upcoming IACHEC newsletter.

  ...  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.