ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for August 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).

  ...  Reviewed CLD files for ready-to-run ECS CTI measurements with 5-CCDs.


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

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

  ...  Continuing to review decision trees and SOPs for the ACIS operational response to PSMC power anomalies.

  ...  Wrote draft of SOP to run the EEPROM checksum routine and dump the EEPROM contents.  SOP is under review

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 bakeout studies, and Chandra pointing accuracy.

  ...  Co-author on a presentation at the San Diego SPIE meeting, "Modeling contamination migration on the Chandra X-ray Observatory III".  Reviewed presentation slides.  Contamination migration studies in this presentation produced lively discussion in the ACIS community.

  ...  Initiated discussions with MIT materials science researchers who study irradiation and annealing.  They will provide expert review of our interpretation of the ACIS reverse annealing experience.

  ...  ACIS Detector Housing heater turned on in the command load on August 11.  Will remain on until further notice.  Required some changes to heater-related telemetry monitoring limits.

  ...  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 planning telecon for next IACHEC meeting (March in Pune, India).  Discussed meeting logsitics.

  ...  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.  

4.2 Generation of commands for ACIS observations

  ...  Continued in training in ACIS command generation and operations procedures including load reviews, SAR/SOP creation, and TST room maintenance.  Eventually will take over some of Royce Buehler's tasks when he retires at the end of the year.