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

Real-time procedures were executed during each ground contact to reset the DSN Outage Dead Man Load.

A Chandra press release was issued on Apr 23 describing observations of a star that had a close encounter with a supermassive black hole and survived. Based on X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, it appears that a red giant star was captured by the strong gravity of the black hole and then was stripped of its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf in a 9-hour orbit. During each orbit the black hole strips more material from the white dwarf, releasing a periodic burst of X-rays. For details see: https://chandra.harvard.edu/press/20_releases/press_042320.html

Of note this week was the release on Apr 22 of CIAO Scripts package 4.12.2. The release includes several important updates, primarily to address changes introduced in the DS 10.8.3 update, which is the underlying software running the standard processing pipeline on new observations. For more details see: https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/ciao/download/scripts/history.html