During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned.

Preparations were completed for the summer 2024 eclipse season; the season contains 13 eclipses and runs from Aug 15 to Sep 16. Real-time procedures were executed on Aug 13 to prepare for the first eclipse: one to activate SCS 29 and one to dump and clear the EPS glitch counters. Chandra passed through the first eclipse of the season on Aug 15, with nominal power and thermal performance.

A real-time procedure was executed on Aug 9 to uplink a flight software patch that updates the contents of SCS-101 and SCS-102 to include several flight software patches to the Control Processing Electronics (CPE). These SCS's are used to re-apply all CPE patches during a Safe-Mode transition in case a reset had occurred in the CPE. Additional real-time procedures were executed on Aug 9-10 to dump OBC-A and OBC-B memory as a follow-up to the flight software patch. The dump will be used to update the baseline memory images maintained on the ground.

A Chandra press release was issued on Aug 14 describing calculations in which astronomers have correctly predicted when a giant black hole finished its last meal — and calculated the schedule for its snacks in the future. A star is in orbit around a supermassive black hole in a galaxy about 860 million light-years from Earth. Each time the star makes its closest approach, the black hole pulls pieces of the star off and consumes some of it. Data from NASA’s Chandra, Swift, and ESA’s XMM-Newton provide astronomers information on when these meals will take place. For details see: https://chandra.harvard.edu/press/24_releases/press_081424.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of AT2024qfm, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Aug 1 and is coordinated with NuSTAR.