ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for June 2016

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).

  ...  Submitted abstract to "Chandra Science for the Next Decade" workshop on "Seventeen years of the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer on Chandra"

2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  1PIN1AT continues to shift between believable and open, but all else is nominal.
  
  ...  ATS commands which run EEPROM checksum commands were run in the JUN0616 load.  Confirmed commands ran as expected, that the checksum matched, and that the EEPROM contents were not dumped.  Will continue to run monthly in the load.  Regular psci monitoring pipeline will now detect and check the bepExecuteReply packets and send out an alert if the checksum is unexpected.

  ...  Received new and updated FOT procedures, switch_bepa_b and switch_bepa_b.  Under review by SOT ACIS.

  ...  Updated MIT index of SOT ACIS procedures to include the recent updates and new procedures.

  ...  Powered off ACIS engineering unit for building HVAC maintenance.  Returned to readiness after work was completed.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Flight software patch F-G-H (improved buscrash2) uploaded in June 2014.

  ...  Documenting procedures for creating and testing ACIS flight software patches.  New memo released on June 6 (ftp://acis.mit.edu/pub/acis-patching-v1.0.pdf)

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Met with materials science experts and discussed their report on the ACIS reverse annealing experience.  Some discussion of the details of how best to estimate the charge distribution in the buried channel.  Plan to edit write-up for submission to a journal.

  ...  Participated in community-wide briefing on the turn-off of the Detector Housing heater and related bakeout studies and testing.  Supported FDB briefing on same.  Commands to turn off the heater are in the JUL1816 load.

  ...  Participated in Thermal Working Group discussion on raising the 1DPAMZT yellow high limit.  ACIS has approved, but FOT needs more analysis.  In the meantime, produced new limit table for related DEA housekeeping thermal limits (BEP_PCB & BEP_OSC).  Will be made live when yellow limit is changed.

  ...  ACIS monitoring software sent out an alert about a possible overclock anomaly on June 7.  A long observation with a large thermal swing and a small subarray was able to mimic the conditions the alert was set to look for, but no actual anomaly was present.  ACIS team is discussing if the alert parameters should be adjusted.

  ...  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.

2.5  Participate in Chandra activities

  ...  Participated in FOT Backup OCC test.  MIT supported test by reading EHS blocks, extracting ACIS science and housekeeping statistics, displaying them, and comparing the backup OCC telemetry dumps to to those received in the TST room through standard channels.  Exposed a problem with the MIT interface to realtime telemetry in which bad data crashed "pmon".  Code has been updated to prevent this in future. 

3.  CXC Support

3.1 Provide user support

  ...  ACIS memo listing calibration ObsIDs and observation characteristics (ACIS Memo #165) will no longer be updated.  Functionality is replaced by new web page (http://acis.mit.edu/asc/evt-page.html), which provides the same information but is more automated.

3.2 Provide data analysis support

  ...  Submitted paper and presented poster at SPIE meeting in June, "Evolution of temperature-dependent charge transfer inefficiency correction for ACIS on the Chandra X-ray Observatory".

  ...  Reviewed slides for annual Chandra thermal and constraints briefing.

  ...  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.  Performed monthly check of all ACIS hardware and software and additional check after update of COG.  

4.2 Generation of commands for ACIS observations

  ...  Continued review and updating of SACGS documentation (SACGS = SOT ACIS Command Generation System).

  ...  Continuing familiarization with SACGS operation and under-the-hood functioning.  Found and fixed SACGS repository error.  Discussion of perl versions, changed a link to ensure use of correct perl regardless of initial setup procedure.  Discussed how energy filters are implemented in the ACIS ruleset.  Investigated issue with SI mode finder webpage.

  ...  Reviewed JUN1316A and B command loads.  Reviewed JUN2016 preliminary schedule and final OR list.  Reviewed JUN2716 Long Term Schedule OR list.

  ...  Dropped chips from two obsids.  Assigned ten SI modes.

  ...  Checking on automated processes associated with SACGS.

  ...  Completed testing of ASCDS 10.5 by the ACIS team, including SACGS, our load review script, and Peter Ford's processing at MIT.  Tests all passed, sent report back to CXC.  Revealed issue with how SACGS calls perl on Red Hat machines.  Currently all ACIS ops personnel use CentOS for SACGS, but SACGS scripts will be updated to prevent problems in the future.