Friday 26 July 2013 9.00am EDT
On Jul 23, we celebrated the 14th anniversary of Chandra's launch and 14 years of successful scientific operations. The spacecraft and instruments continue to operate superbly well and we look forward with excitement to the coming year of science discovery! During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned. Real-time procedures were executed on Jul 20 to prepare for the first eclipse of the summer 2013 season: one to activate SCS 29, one to dump and clear the EPS glitch counters, and one to set the short eclipse flag to "true". Chandra passed through the first and second eclipses of the season on Jul 21 and 23 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance. A real-time procedure was executed on Jul 24 to set the short eclipse flag to "false" in preparation for the medium-length eclipses expected for the remainder of the season. Of note last week was the successful transition to operations on Jul 24 of an updated version of the Operations Control Center ground system. The update replaces a system that has been in operation since Nov 2005 and includes new network and computer hardware as well as updated versions of the ground-system software. The new ground system provides a more capable, more secure, more flexible, more maintainable, and "greener" data system. The schedule of targets for next week is shown below |
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Radiation Belts Jul 29 2216-038 ACIS-S RXJ1856.5-3754 ACIS-S/LETG Jul 30 G003.90-59.41 ACIS-I VelaX-1 ACIS-S/HETG NGC3918 ACIS-S Jul 31 Radiation Belts EXO0748-676 ACIS-S Aug 1 Virgocoldfront ACIS-I Radiation Belts Aug 3 NGC16242Min ACIS-S NGC6819 ACIS-S Aug 4 NGC6337 ACIS-S
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All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.
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