ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for November 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.  Further editing.

  ...  Attended and presented poster at "Fifteen years of Chandra" meeting on "Fifteen years of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer".

  ...  Discussions/review of CXC Cal study of how line energy and width changes with time and temperature.  Overall temperature-dependent CTI correction does OK, but there's room for improvement.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  Engineering housekeeping remains nominal.

  ...  Continued study of potential future ACIS boot problem. The EEPROM devices that contain the boot code for the ACIS digital processers are well beyond their specified data retention period.  While they current show no signs of failing, the ACIS team is determining an operation strategy for monitoring EEPROM health and a decision tree for mitigation efforts if problems are found.  Developing commands to dump EEPROM checksum.

  ...  Ran a third test of Detector Housing Heater which has been turned off since 2008.  Heater was turned on for an entire orbit over a range of pitch angles.  The heater performed as expected.  This data will be used to begin recalibrating the focal plane temperature model with the heater on.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  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 the results of the third test of the DH heater.  Discussed progress on SOP/CAP to respond to video board and FEP anomalies.  Discussed progress on developing commands to dump EEPROM checksum.

  ...  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).

  ...  Reviewed proposed documentation on anomalous short-timescale gain changes on I0 and I2 (not a new problem, just new documentation).

  ...  Reviewed ACIS chapter of the Chandra Proposers Observatory Guide.
 
3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and flight data products.
  
  ...  Participated in planning telecon for next IACHEC meeting (April in Beijing).  Discussed meeting logistics and program.

  ...  Revewed IACHEC newsletter summarizing results of the 9th meeting in May 2014

  ...  Replaced dead RAID controller on machine which stores ACIS data analysis and monitoring backups.

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.