During the last week the Chandra Operations team completed the Safe Mode recovery procedure to return to the prime hardware at 10:30am EDT on Oct 12. The team completed clean-up activities including transition to attitude control by pointing at stars, a fine attitude update required to resume regular operations following the Safe Mode, and a maneuver to an attitude to prepare for further procedures at 6:30pm on Oct 12.

Chandra remains in its normal pointing mode and has been maneuvered to ensure the spacecraft and instruments remain at a cool operating temperature. The Flight Operations Team has completed testing and simulation of the procedures and on-board software updates that will place Chandra into a new gyroscope configuration with the gyroscope that caused the Oct 10 safe mode in reserve. The switch is scheduled for Friday night and will be followed by a period of collecting maneuver data to validate and calibrate the new configuration prior to resuming science observing, planned for early next week.

A Chandra press release was issued on Oct 15 describing observations of GRB 150101B. Analysis of data from Chandra, combined with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, and the Discovery Channel Telescope show GRB 150101B shares remarkable similarities to the neutron star merger and gravitational wave source discovered by Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and its European counterpart Virgo in 2017 known as GW170817. The latest study concludes that these two separate objects may be related. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/press/18_releases/press_101618.html

A Chandra image release was issued on Oct 18 describing observations of the pulsar Kes 75 and its associated pulsar wind nebula. The Chandra data taken in 2000, 2006, 2009, and 2016 show changes in the pulsar wind nebula with time. Between 2000 and 2016, the Chandra observations reveal that the outer edge of the pulsar wind nebula is expanding at 1 million meters per second. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2018/kes75/