ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for July 2020

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).


2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  Reviewed trends in engineering data for the past 60 days; no unexpected trends were seen.

  ...  The EEPROM checksum was verified in the JUL0620A load.   Will continue to run monthly.  MIT telemetry processing will automatically check the results and send out an alert if the checksum is unexpected.

  ...  The ACIS Engineering Unit remains powered off, which is the safest long-term unsupervised state.  This imposes a moratorium on new SI modes for observers, testing new FSW patches, and testing anomaly scenarios until campus access is restored.  Plan is to power on the EU in mid-August.


2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  ACIS flight software patch G-H-I (improved buscrash and new deahktrip) uploaded on January 24, 2020.  First new patch set since June 2014.  No issues to date.

  ...  We continue to monitor threshold crossing rates.  The current TXINGS parameters were last updated on July 28, 2016.  Threshold crossing rates may have flattened out and started decreasing recently, potentially indicating the end of solar minimum.

  ...  Continued work on developing a QEMU ACIS processor emulator.  The emulator can potentially serve as a backup for the EU and as a tool to investigate software anomalies of a rare or transient nature that would be difficult to characterize with the EU.  At present, the emulator includes two BEPs, six FEPs, the digital DEA, acisCtl, various pipes, sockets, and shared memory,  can run on Linux or MacOSX, and can run all existing ACIS command loads and flight software patches.

  ...  Continued team review of ACIS Flight Software User's Guide using the new version B released in April.  Finished sections on starting and stopping the software, began section on changing the system configuration.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meetings.  Reviewed plans for the Chandra IRU swap activity, the state of the EU, and an issue with telemetry database P015.

  ...  Supported Chandra IRU swap activity including instrument monitoring and review and execution of CAP 1535 to collect ECS data during ACIS idle time.

  ...  Continued daily quick-look processing of ACIS telemetry and maintained Web interface to ACIS real-time data.  Corrected problem with times associated with May safe mode.

  ...  Continued to publish the "annotated DOT" timeline reports.


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

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops ACIS response discussion group.  Discussed status of CTI correction calibration and thoughts for improvement, collecting additional ECS data, initial results from Cas A observations, and calibration at warmer temperatures.

  ...  Continued to maintain ACIS calibration database of ground and flight data products.

  ...  Answered V&V scientist question about bias-only ECS data.  This is a result of the FOT MP changes in ECS scheduling to recover more science time.


4.  OCC Support

4.1 Use of MIT/ACIS EGSE at OCC

  ...  Continued support and maintenance of ACIS EGSE software and hardware at the Wayside OCC.  Checked on status and restarted monitoring software.

  ...  Confirmed procedure for ACIS to get access to OCC if required.  (No access is currently needed.)

4.2 Generation of commands for ACIS observations

  ...  Checked ACIS configuration for joint observatory proposals newly ingested into the OCAT.  Three had bad configurations which were referred to USINT.

  ...  Helped USINT with questions about optional chips.

  ...  Completed ACIS testing of CXCDS 10.9, including SACGS, load review scripts, and the MIT processing pipeline.  Submitted test report.

  ...  Updated ACIS environment configuration file for the release of CXCDS 10.9.  Assisted SOT MP in debugging a related issue.

  ...  Continued working on contingency plans for how to update the ACIS ruleset and ACIS tables in the event of a FEP failure.

  ...  Reviewed JUL2020A and JUL2020T command loads.  Reviewed JUL2720 preliminary schedule, and JUL2720 final OR list.

  ...  Assigned 4 SI modes.  Dropped chips from 10 ObsIDs.

  ...  Checking on automated processes associated with SACGS.