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Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 19 December 2008 8.00am EDT

During the last week the observing schedule was replanned to include a 35 ks observation of the source CSS081007:030559+054715 that was accepted as a fast turn-around Target Of Opportunity (TOO) on Dec 16. Loads were replanned and uplinked on Oct 18. Observations of RXCJ0352.9+1941, M31 and 3C98 were impacted by the TOO and will be rescheduled in a later load.

A real-time procedure was conducted on Dec 11 to activate SCS 29 in preparation for the start of the 2008 winter eclipse season. Chandra passed through the first three eclipses of the season on Dec 12, 15 and 17 with nominal power and thermal performance.

A real-time procedure was completed on Dec 17 to update the on-board ephemeris. A procedure was also conducted on Dec 18 to uplink a flight software patch to modify three Electrical Power System (EPS) K-constants. The new settings will prevent the EPS F_Eclipse flag from inadvertently toggling while the spacecraft is in sunlight. The change is needed as a result of the general heating trend experienced by the spacecraft as the mission progresses.

A Chandra press release was issued on Dec 16 as a NASA press conference. By tracking how dark energy has limited the growth of galaxy clusters and combining these results with previous studies, a team lead by Alexey Vikhlinin has obtained the best constraints so far on models describing the nature of dark energy. This release generated significant interest in the press. For details see: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/darkenergy/

Of note this week was the release on Dec 15 of the Cycle 11 Call for Proposals. The proposal submission deadline is 17 Mar 2009.

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes a majority of grating observations.

------------------------------------------
Radiation Belts                     Dec 22
H2356-309              HRC-S/LETG   Dec 23
SN1996cr               ACIS-S/HETG
SDSSJ211552.88+0001    ACIS-S       Dec 24
3C98                   ACIS-I
SN1996cr               ACIS-S/HETG
Radiation Belts                     Dec 25
H2356-309              HRC-S/LETG
SN1996cr               ACIS-S/HETG  Dec 26
KappaOri               ACIS-S/HETG
SN1996cr               ACIS-S/HETG  Dec 27
Radiation Belts                     Dec 28
3C349                  ACIS-S
H2356-309              HRC-S/LETG   Dec 28

------------------------------------------

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

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