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Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 23 July 2004 1.00pm EDT

Today we celebrate the 5th anniversary of Chandra's launch and 5 years of successful scientific operations. The spacecraft and instruments continue to operate superbly well and we look forward with great excitement to the next 5 years of new science discovery!

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

Chandra passed through the first three eclipses of the 2004 summer eclipse season with nominal power and thermal performance. The first eclipse on July 18 was penumbra-only and required an off-point of the solar arrays to discharge the batteries sufficiently to avoid an over-voltage condition on eclipse exit. All flight software patches and real-time operations were completed successfully.

A procedure was executed from the daily load on July 20 to lower the ACIS focal-plane set-point temperature to determine the thermal control properties of the radiator and focal-plane combination. The data will be compared with a previous measurement made May 2003 to investigate trends in the temperature control margin.

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of V 4641 Sgr coordinated with the VLA, and three observations of the Moon.

------------------------------------------
Radiation Belts                     Jul 26
RCS2156.7-0448         ACIS-S
MS30.7                 ACIS-S       Jul 27
Moon (3 obs)           HRC-I
3C273-JET              ACIS-S
MACS1115.2+5320        ACIS-I       Jul 28
RXJ1420+5334           ACIS-S
Radiation Belts
SBS 1520+530           ACIS-S       Jul 29
NGC 4485/4490          ACIS-S
NGC4214                ACIS-S       Jul 30
F1520-608              ACIS-S
V 4641 Sgr             ACIS-S
G351.2+0.1             ACIS-S
Radiation Belts                     Jul 31
G341.9-0.3             ACIS-S       Aug 1 
RCS2156.7-0448         ACIS-S

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

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

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