Friday 10 November 2023 9.00am EST
During the last week, the observing schedule was interrupted due to high radiation associated with solar activity. The loads were halted at 7:30am EST on Nov 5 through a ground command to execute the SI Safing SCS 107. This ensured that the accumulated radiation dose for ACIS remained below the allowed threshold. All spacecraft actions were nominal. Loads for a replanned schedule were uplinked on Nov 7 with about 90ks of science time lost. Planned observations impacted by the interruption will be rescheduled. A real time procedure was executed on Nov 4 to set the short eclipse flag to "false" in preparation for the medium-length eclipse expected. Real-time procedures were executed on Nov 7 to disable SCS-29 and to dump and clear the EPS glitch counters as post-eclipse season actions. Chandra passed through the 24th and 25th (and final) eclipses of the season on Nov 3 and 6, respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance. Chandra press and image releases were issued on Nov 6 describing the discovery of the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays. Located in a galaxy labeled UHZ1 at a distance of about 13.2 billion light-years, the black hole and its host galaxy are seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age. UHZ1 is fortuitously along the line-of-sight to the much closer galaxy cluster Abell 2744 and could be detected because gravitational lensing caused by Abell 2744 enhances the signal from UHZ1. This discovery, based on combining data from Chandra (to identify the black hole, with an estimated mass between 10 and 100 million Suns) and James Webb Space Telescope (to identify the parent galaxy), is important for understanding how some supermassive black holes reach remarkably large masses soon after the big bang, given physical limits on their rate of growth. For details see: https://chandra.harvard.edu/press/23_releases/press_110623.html The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes observations of HE0230-2130, which is a follow-up to a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity accepted on Oct 31, observations of AT2023fhn, which is a follow-up to a Target of Opportunity accepted on Oct 16, an observation of SN2022xxf, which is a follow-up to a Target of Opportunity accepted on Apr 19 and is coordinated with NuSTAR, and an observation of AT2021lwx, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Jul 6. |
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GaiaDR247804394753 ACIS-S Nov 13 BD-202976 HRC-I NGC1566 ACIS-S SPT-CLJ0417-4748 ACIS-S HE0230-2130 ACIS-S Nov 14 Radiation Belts PSOJ030947.49+27175 ACIS-S CXOUJ232327.8+58484 HRC-S Nov 15 AT2023fhn ACIS-S PSOJ030947.49+27175 ACIS-S AT2023fhn ACIS-S MOOJ0346+2003 ACIS-I AT2023fhn ACIS-S Nov 16 MOOJ0346+2003 ACIS-I SN2022xxf ACIS-S PSRJ0007+7303 ACIS-I Radiation Belts Nov 17 HE0230-2130 ACIS-S SPT-CLJ0417-4748 ACIS-S SDSSJ004719.71+0148 ACIS-S PSOJ030947.49+27175 ACIS-S HD226868 ACIS-S/HETG Nov 18 CXOUJ232327.8+58484 HRC-S PSOJ030947.49+27175 ACIS-S AT2021lwx ACIS-S CXOUJ232327.8+58484 HRC-S PSOJ030947.49+27175 ACIS-S Nov 19 HD226868 ACIS-S/HETG PSOJ030947.49+27175 ACIS-S Radiation Belts
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All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.
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