ACIS Instrument Support - Monthly Progress Report for December 2023

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.  Procedure updates due to web server security changes. Updated monitoring web pages.  (http://space.mit.edu/~cgrant/monitor.html).

  ...  Submitted abstract to HEAD meeting on "The Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer on the Chandra X-ray Observatory: Twenty five years of on-orbit operation".


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 DEC0423A 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.  All nominal in December.

2.2 Flight software maintenance

  ...  ACIS flight software patch H-J-K uploaded on September 19, 2022.  First new patch set since August 2022.  No issues to date.

  ...  Working on procedures to be used in the event of a BEP anomaly to dump various parts of BEP memory.  Standard commands and CLD files exist, and could be run via CAP. Working on a "boot-by-uplink" procedure which would better preserve memory before the dump.

  ...  We continue to monitor threshold crossing rates which have recently flatten out. The current set of TXing parameters were uploaded on October 11, 2023.

2.3 Instrument science performance

  ...  Participated in monthly ACIS operations meeting.  Discussed status of new SI mode for FMT1, thinking about our response to future failures of temperature sensors, planning BEP diagnostic procedures for future BEP anomalies.

  ...  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

  ...  ACIS memo listing calibration ObsIDs and observation characteristics (ACIS Memo #165) will no longer be updated.  Functionality is replaced by new web page (http://acisweb.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.


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.  After biannual COG restart, both EGSE required attention to restart telemetry monitoring.

4.2 Generation of commands for ACIS observations

  ...  Reviewed DEC2523A and DEC2523B command loads; DEC2523 final and post-final OR lists; DEC2523 (x2) preliminary schedules; and DEC2523 (x2), JAN0824 (x2), JAN1524 (x3) LTS OR lists.

  ...  Checking on automated processes associated with SACGS.