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Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 1 July 2016 9.00am EDT

During the last week the observing schedule was replanned to incorporate an observation of GRB 160624A, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Jun 25 and coordinated with HST. An observation of Cygnus A - W Hotspot was impacted by the replan and will be rescheduled in a future week.

Preparations were completed for the summer 2016 eclipse season; the season contains ten eclipses and runs from Jun 28 to Jul 22. Real-time procedures were executed on Jun 27 to prepare for the first eclipse: one to activate SCS 29, one to dump and clear the EPS glitch counters, and one to set the short eclipse flag to "true". Chandra passed through the first eclipse of the season on Jun 28, with nominal power and thermal performance. A real-time procedure was executed on Jun 29 to set the short eclipse flag to "false" in preparation for the medium-length eclipses expected to follow.

A real-time procedure was executed on Jun 29 to uplink a flight software patch that updates the feed-forward unloading torque scale factor, one of the momentum unloading parameters. This change will address an increasing trend in the observed maximum attitude errors during momentum unloads. Additional real-time procedures were executed on Jun 30 - Jul 1 to dump OBC-A and -B memory as a follow-up to the patch. The dump will be used to update the baseline memory images maintained on the ground.

A Chandra press release was issued on Jun 27 describing observations of VLA J2130+12 that have resolved its identity. This object contains a very quiet black hole, a few times the Sun's mass, about 7,200 light years from Earth. This discovery implies that there could be many more black holes in the galaxy than previously accounted for. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/press/16_releases/press_062716.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes observations of SGR 1935+2154 and XMMU J004855.5-734946, which were accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Targets of Opportunity on Jun 29 and 30 respectively.



------------------------------------------
        Radiation Belts                     Jul  4
        M81E                   ACIS-I
        NGC6357_CS61           ACIS-I       Jul  5
        XMMUJ004855.5-73494    ACIS-S       Jul  6
        Radiation Belts                     Jul  7
        SGR1935+2154           ACIS-S
        PSRJ2124-3358          ACIS-S
        RCru                   ACIS-I       Jul  8
        1RXSJ083842.1-28272    ACIS-S
        ESO119-8               ACIS-S       Jul  9
        Radiation Belts
        Mkn421                 ACIS-S/LETG
        A1302                  ACIS-I       Jul 10
        Vega (4 obs)           HRC-S

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

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

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