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

Real-time procedures were executed on Aug 1 to swap the prime solid-state recorder (SSR) from the A-side to the B-side. This swap concludes a six-month interval of health and trending data collection on SSR-A. Other real-time procedures were executed on Aug 1 and Aug 2 to dump OBC-A and -B memory as a follow-up to the patches uplinked on Jul 30-31. The dumps will be used to update the baseline memory images maintained on the ground. Real-time procedures were executed on Aug 5 to perform a routine self-check of the Electrical Interface Assembly (EIA) Sequencer and to perform a diagnostic dump of the Control Processing Electronics (CPE).

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

Chandra press and image releases were issued on Aug 3 featuring Chandra observations of the galaxy cluster SpARCS104922.6+564032.5 (SpARCS1049 for short) located about 9.9 billion light years away from Earth, combined with observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope. Stars are seen to be forming at an extraordinary rate of about 900 new Suns worth of mass per year in SpARCS1049, and in a region outside of the cluster galaxies. This burst of star formation is attributed to an inactive supermassive black hole in the central galaxy, which would otherwise inject sufficient energy into its surroundings to limit star formation. For details, see: https://chandra.harvard.edu/press/20_releases/press_080320.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of AT2019wxt, which is a follow-up to a Target of Opportunity accepted on Mar 10, observations of Hercules X-1, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Jul 20 and is coordinated with XMM and NuSTAR, and an observation of Betelgeuse, which is a follow-up to a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity accepted on Jan 29.