ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for December 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.  Minor fixes to time tags and overclock monitoring. 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.

  ...  Discussions/review of CXC Cal study of how line energy and width changes with time and temperature.  Reviewing FWHM results.

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


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  Engineering housekeeping remains as-expected.

  ...  Ran a fourth 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.

  ...  Reviewed updated version of contingency SOP for switching from BEP A to BEP B.  Preparing for testing with the ACIS Engineering Unit.  (http://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/acis/acis_command_sequences.html ; 5.9_V2.1 Switch from BEP A to BEP B)

  ...  Released new version of memo on the Hi-Lo Pixel Anomaly and suggested future responses which could be executed to provide more diagnostic data.  (ftp://acis.mit.edu/pub/hi-lo-pixel-anomaly-v1.4.pdf)  Reviewed draft versions of CLD and RTS files for proposed diagnostic procedures.  Waiting to review formal FOT procedure document.

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

  ...  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 user question on best references to use for ACIS contamination.
 
3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops ACIS response discussion group.  Discussion included low energy gain on S1 and S3, contamination monitoring, and planning for the eventual phasing-out of the ECS as a calibration source.

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and flight data products.
  
  ...  Revewed IACHEC newsletter summarizing results of the 9th meeting in May 2014.  Published on astro-ph (arXiv:1412.6233).


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.