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Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 4 May 2012 9.00am EDT

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

Chandra passed through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth eclipses of the season on Apr 27 and 30 and May 2 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance. A real-time procedure was executed on May 1 to set the short eclipse flag to "true" in preparation for the final three eclipses of the season.

A real-time procedure was executed on May 2 to perform a routine self-check of the Electrical Interface Assembly (EIA) Sequencer.

A Chandra press release was issued on Apr 30 as a NASA press release describing observations of an outburst of X-rays from a black hole in the galaxy M83. The X-ray output from the black hole increased by about 3,000 times. This discovery suggests that there may be a population of older, volatile stellar-mass black holes. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/press/12_releases/press_043012.html

A Chandra press release was issued on May 3 as a NASA press release describing evidence that a star that wandered too close to a supermassive black hole was ripped apart. This discovery was made using NASA's GALEX telescope and the Pan-STARRS1 observatory in Hawaii. The galaxy where this violent act occurred is called PS1-10jh and is located about 2.7 billion light years from Earth. Researchers used Chandra data to rule out a competing theory of an active galactic nucleus. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/press/12_releases/press_050312.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes observations of Sgr A* coordinated with several ground-based observatories.



------------------------------------------
MSPeg                  ACIS-S       May  6
         SgrA*                  ACIS-S/HETG
         3c313                  ACIS-S       May  7
         3c327.1                ACIS-S
         Radiation Belts                     May  8
         ESO244-IG030           ACIS-S
         SPT-CLJ0456-5116       ACIS-I
         HD125823               ACIS-S       May  9
         GX349+2                ACIS-S/HETG
         SgrA*                  ACIS-S/HETG
         Radiation Belts                     May 10
         SgrA*                  ACIS-S/HETG  May 11
         PSRJ1339-4712          ACIS-S       May 13

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

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

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