ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for April 2023

1.  ACIS Characterization

1.3 Monitor scientific on-orbit performance of ACIS

  ...  Due to high radiation environment, the ACIS team recommended a shutdown of science observing on April 23.

  ...  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 a SAR (special activity request) for new raw mode data in May.

  ...  Collecting material for the Chandra Quarterly in May.

  ...  Provided access to ACIS threshold crossings data for SOT operations radiation study.

2.  Engineering

2.1 Instrument hardware engineering performance

  ...  Continue to monitor long term ACIS instrument performance.  Engineering trending over the past 60 days is nominal.

  ...  The EEPROM checksum was verified in the APR1023A loads. Will continue to run monthly.  MIT telemetry processing will automatically check the results and send out an alert if the checksum is unexpected.

  ...  Continued weekly physical audit of the ACIS Engineering Unit lab. 

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  Command packets for the ACIS FSW patch H-J-K are in development. This patch load includes three new standard patches and an update to an existing patch, which fix bugs and improves the ACIS response to unexpected shutdowns and BEP crashes. 

  ...  ACIS flight software patch G-I-J (improved TXings) uploaded on August 11, 2022.  First new patch set since January 2020.  No issues to date.

  ...  We continue to monitor threshold crossing rates. Threshold crossing rates are dropping and a new set of TXing parameters were uploaded on April 4, 2023. The previous parameter update was February 10, 2023.  

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  After OS update, worked to get ACIS science telemetry monitoring restarted.  Required reinstallation of perl and perl modules.

  ...  Continued daily quick-look processing of ACIS telemetry and maintained web interface to ACIS real-time data. Fixed issue with old ACIS tables associated with real-time monitoring.

  ...  Continued to publish the "annotated DOT" timeline reports.
  
3.  CXC Support

3.1 Provide user support

  ...  Provided comments on ACIS article for upcoming Chandra newsletter.

  ...  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

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

  ...  Participated in CXC Cal/Ops response discussion group.  Discussed updates on ECS and time-dependent gain calibration, the use of Perseus cluster for high energy gain calibration, and results from -105C test observations.

  ...  Participating in final planning for and attending the in-person IACHEC meeting in April.  Presented results from ACIS quiescent background monitoring. 


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.  Restarted both EGSE machines routinely.

4.2 Generation of commands for ACIS observations

  ...  New MIT ACIS team member second week on-call was April 17-23.  Provided backup support.

  ...  Reviewed 2- and 3-CCD ECS RTS files.

  ...  Reviewed APR2423A, APR2423B command loads; APR2423(x2) final OR lists; APR2423(x2), APR2523 preliminary schedules; and MAY0823(x2) LTS OR lists.

  ...  Checking on automated processes associated with SACGS.