Friday 21 February 2014 9.00am EST
During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned. Chandra passed through the seventh, eight, and ninth (and final) eclipses of the season on Feb 14, 17, and 20 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance. Real-time procedures were executed on Feb 20 to disable SCS-29 and to dump and clear the EPS glitch counters as post-eclipse season actions. A real-time procedure was used to monitor the momentum unload that was executed from the on-board command loads on Feb 14; the unload performance was nominal. A flight software patch was uplinked on on Feb 19 which updates SCS-31 to add EIA Command Decoder side-B (channel 1) redundancy to side-A (channel 0) command counterparts. This patch increases the robustness of the autonomous response to safe-mode events. Real-time procedures were executed on Feb 19 and 20 to dump OBC-A memory as a follow-up to the patch. The dump will be used to update the baseline memory image maintained on the ground. A Chandra press release was issued on Feb 18 as a NASA press release describing observations of IGR J11014-6103, a runaway pulsar with an extraordinary jet trailing behind it. This pulsar - a spinning neutron star - is moving between 2.5 million and 5 million miles per hour. Behind the pulsar there is a tail that stretches for 37 light years, making it the longest X-ray jet ever seen from an object in the Milky Way. This tail has a corkscrew pattern, indicating that the pulsar is wobbling like a top as it spins. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/press/14_releases/press_021814.html The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of Pluto, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Feb 7. |
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Pluto ACIS-S Feb 24 Virgocoldfront ACIS-I SwiftJ1822.3-1606 ACIS-S Feb 25 Markarian1040 ACIS-S/HETG Radiation Belts Markarian1040 ACIS-S/HETG Feb 26 SwiftJ1822.3-1606 ACIS-S IGRJ17174-2436 ACIS-I Feb 27 Virgocoldfront ACIS-I HESSJ1848-018 ACIS-I Virgocoldfront ACIS-I Radiation Belts Feb 28 DeepField10 ACIS-I XTEJ1810-197 ACIS-S Mar 1 Virgocoldfront ACIS-I hrc-3 HRC-I Virgocoldfront ACIS-I Mar 2
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All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.
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