Friday 14 September 2012 9.00am EDT
During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned. Chandra passed through the fourteenth and fifteenth eclipses of the season on Sep 9 and 12 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance. A real time procedure was completed nominally on Sep 13 to uplink flight software patches to the Control Processing Electronics (CPE) and the On-board Computer (OBC). The CPE patch increases the Angular Momentum Auto-unload limit from 31.9 ft-lb-sec to 50.0 ft-lb-sec in order to maintain low momentum levels but avoid unnecessary unloading in Safe-Mode. The OBC patch updates this threshold value in SCS 101, which is used to re-apply the CPE patches during a Safe-Mode transition in case a reset had occurred in the CPE. Additional real-time procedures were executed on Sep 13-14 to dump OBC-A memory as a follow-up to the flight software patch. The dump will be used to update the baseline memory image maintained on the ground. A Chandra image release was issued on Sep 11 describing observations of Kepler's supernova remnant. Kepler's supernova remnant is the debris from a supernova in our galaxy observed in 1604. New analysis suggests that the supernova explosion was more powerful, and occurred at a greater distance, than previously thought. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2012/kepler/ The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes observations of GRB120804A and Swift J174805.3-244637, which were accepted as a Targets of Opportunity on Aug 30 and Sep 4 respectively, an observation of M15 X-3 coordinated with HST, and an observation of NGC 253 coordinated with the VLBA. |
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Radiation Belts Sep 17 SwiftJ174805.3-2446 ACIS-S M15X-3 ACIS-S Sep 18 NGC253 ACIS-I PKS2155-152 ACIS-S GRB120804A ACIS-S M51 ACIS-S Sep 19 Radiation Belts M51 ACIS-S Sep 20 Radiation Belts Sep 22 M51 ACIS-S
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All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.
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