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

A real-time procedure was executed on Jul 31 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.

Additional Real-time procedures were executed on Aug 2 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).

A Chandra image release was issued on Aug 2 describing observations of El Gordo, a gigantic galaxy cluster containing as much as 3 million billion times the mass of the Sun. A new composite image of El Gordo shows the diffuse, superheated gas in the cluster observed in X-rays from Chandra along with a new infrared image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The X-ray image of El Gordo reveals a distinct cometary appearance. Along with optical data, astronomers infer that El Gordo is the site of two galaxy clusters that ran into one another at several million miles per hour. For details see: https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2023/elgordo/

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes observations of SN 2023ixf, which are follow-ups to a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity which was accepted on May 22, and an observation of Hercules X-1, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Jul 28 and is coordinated with XMM.