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Operations CXO Status Report

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.



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

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

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

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