Friday 18 December 2020 9.00am EST
During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned. Chandra passed through the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth eclipses of the season on Dec 11, Dec 13, and Dec 16 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance. Real-time procedures were executed during each ground contact to reset the DSN Outage Dead Man Load. Of note this week was the release on Dec 16 of the Cycle 23 Call
for Proposals. The proposal submission deadline is 16 March 2021.
In conjunction with the call was the release of the CIAO 4.13
analysis software system, CALDB 4.9.4, DS9 8.2, and MARX 5.5.1.
For details see: A Chandra image releases was issued on Dec 17 featuring the hunt for the giant black hole which should be at the center of the galaxy cluster Abell 2261. Despite searches with Chandra and HST, astronomers have no direct evidence of the black hole estimated to weigh between 3 billion and 100 billion solar masses, has been found. For details, see: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2020/a2261/ The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of AT2020xnd, which is a follow-up to a Target of Opportunity accepted on Oct 26 and is coordinated with NuSTAR, an observation of ESO253-G003, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Nov 18, observations of PSRB1259-63, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Oct 19, and an observation of GRB201214B, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Dec 16. |
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2RXSJ202850.9+21410 ACIS-S Dec 20 M51 ACIS-S Dec 21 Radiation Belts 3CR141 ACIS-S Dec 22 HD185239 HRC-I GRB201214B ACIS-S M82X-2 HRC-I 2MASSJ05215658+4359 ACIS-S H1821+643 HRC-S /LETG Dec 23 3CR125 ACIS-S AT2020xnd ACIS-S Radiation Belts Dec 24 PSRB1259-63 ACIS-I OrionNebulaCluster ACIS-S/HETG PSRB1259-63 ACIS-I Dec 25 OrionNebulaCluster ACIS-S/HETG PSRB1259-63 ACIS-I Dec 26 ESO253-G003 ACIS-S 2MASSJ05215658+4359 ACIS-S Radiation Belts Dec 27 NGC4485/90 ACIS-S
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All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.
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