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Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 11 March 2011 9.00am EST

During the last week the observing schedule was replanned to include a 100 ks observation of the source 4U 1820-30 that was accepted as a fast turn-around Target of Opportunity on Mar 5. The replanned loads were uplinked on Mar 6.

On Mar 8 ground processing identified anomalous behavior in a observation from the previous day: there was no event data produced from the ACIS I0 CCD. A real-time procedure was executed on Mar 9 to perform diagnostic measurements on ACIS; all measurements were nominal. The anomalous performance is considered to have been a temporary condition and its possible root cause will be investigated. The ACIS IO CCD has performed nominally in all observations since the anomaly.

A real-time procedure was executed on Mar 4 to re-initialize the flight software Thruster Command Processing subfunction in order to prevent the occurrence of an overflow condition.

A Chandra image release was issued on Mar 10 describing NGC 4151, a spiral galaxy with an actively growing supermassive black hole at its center. The X-ray, optical, and radio composite image shows the central region of NGC 4151, dubbed the "Eye of Sauron" by astronomers for its similarity to the eye of the malevolent character in "The Lord of the Rings". A recent study has shown that the X-ray emission was likely caused by an outburst powered by the supermassive black hole located in the white region in the center of the galaxy. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2011/n4151/

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below

------------------------------------------
Radiation Belts                     Mar 14
AKARI-NEP-DeepField    ACIS-I       Mar 15
Crab                   ACIS-S
Vega                   HRC-I
Vega (4 obs)           HRC-S
HZ43                   HRC-I/LETG
M83                    ACIS-S
HZ43                   HRC-S/LETG   Mar 16
AKARI-NEP-DeepField    ACIS-I
AKARI-NEP-DeepField    ACIS-I
SDSSJ1412+0624         ACIS-S
a1750ss                ACIS-I
Radiation Belts                     Mar 17
SDSSJ171544.05+6008    ACIS-S
AKARI-NEP-DeepField    ACIS-I       Mar 18
1RXSJ125948.7+34232    ACIS-S
NGC5087                ACIS-S
M83                    ACIS-S
Radiation Belts                     Mar 19
A1882a                 ACIS-S       Mar 20

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

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

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