ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for June 2015

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).

  ...  Presented poster at June HEAD meeting on "The Effects of Orbital Environment on X-ray CCD Performance".  Presents what we've learned from long-term CCD performance on Chandra and Suzaku and extrapolates to future missions in LEO and L2.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

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

  ...  SOP for flight procedure "switch_deaa_b" that switches PSMC power from DEA-A to DEA-B is being revised to include more diagnostic information after thinking through actual scenarios that would require this procedure.  Planning for a meeting on general hardware recovery procedures in July.

  ...  Commands to dump the EEPROM checksum created and in ACIS tables.  SOP is being written.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Flight software patch F-G-H (improved buscrash2) uploaded in June 2014 and has continued to run with no issues.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meeting.  Discussed progress in various flight procedures, plans for turning on the DH heater long-term, and plans for bakeout studies.

  ...  Participated in community-wide briefing on possible future DH heater turn-on.  No major objections.  Plans are in the works to proceed in August.

  ...  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. Discussion included low energy gain on S1 and S3, the ACIS detector housing heater, contamination, potential future bakeout studies, and further contamination analysis.

  ...  Participated in telecon discussion regarding future studies on potential ACIS bakeout.  Will reconvene in the fall.  ACIS instrument team has agreed to re-examine and summarize the existing memos, published papers and presentations.

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and flight data products.
  
  ...  Participated in annual Chandra thermal and constraints briefing.

  ...  Co-author of paper for the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems on "A synoptic view of X-ray in-flight calibration plans" a product of the IACHEC Heritage Working Group.  Submitted third round of edits to first author.  Paper submitted.


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.  

4.2 Generation of commands for ACIS observations

  ...  Continued in training in ACIS command generation and operations procedures including SI mode assignment and ne SI mode generation.  Eventually will take over some of Royce Buehler's tasks when he retires at the end of the year.