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

Chandra passed through the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth eclipses of the season on Aug 24, 27, and 29 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance. A real-time procedure was executed on Aug 24 to dump and clear a glitch counter that incremented during the eclipse exit on Aug 24. The counter increment is expected under certain timing and thermal conditions.

Real-time procedures were executed on Aug 24 to swap from using MUPS-A to using MUPS-B for routine operations. In addition to the hardware reconfiguration, the flight software was patched to maintain hardware/software consistency. Chandra is now configured to use MUPS-B for routine operations and MUPS-A for safe-mode. After the swap was complete a momentum unload was performed via the on-board computer. The thrusters employed in the unload (B1, B3, and B4) exhibited nominal performance. The flight software Thruster Command Processing subfunction was subsequently re-initialized for easier tracking of B2 thruster use. Real-time procedures were executed on Aug 24 and 25 to dump OBC-A memory as a follow-up to the patches. The dump will be used to update the baseline memory image maintained on the ground. A real-time procedure was used to monitor the momentum unload that was executed from the on-board command loads on Aug 29; the unload performance was nominal.

A Chandra press release was issued on Aug 29 as a NASA press release describing observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. New Chandra results help explain why gas near Sgr A* is so faint in X-rays. Less than 1% of the material in the black hole's gravitational grasp appears to actually reach the event horizon. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/press/13_releases/press_082913.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of GRB130702A, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Aug 14 and an observation of SDSS J1435+4001 coordinated with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope.