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Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 18 December 2020 9.00am EST

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

Chandra passed through the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth eclipses of the season on Dec 11, Dec 13, and Dec 16 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance.

Real-time procedures were executed during each ground contact to reset the DSN Outage Dead Man Load.

Of note this week was the release on Dec 16 of the Cycle 23 Call for Proposals. The proposal submission deadline is 16 March 2021. In conjunction with the call was the release of the CIAO 4.13 analysis software system, CALDB 4.9.4, DS9 8.2, and MARX 5.5.1. For details see:
https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/ciao/download/
https://cxc.harvard.edu/caldb/
https://ds9.si.edu/site/Home.html
and
http://space.mit.edu/cxc/marx

A Chandra image releases was issued on Dec 17 featuring the hunt for the giant black hole which should be at the center of the galaxy cluster Abell 2261. Despite searches with Chandra and HST, astronomers have no direct evidence of the black hole estimated to weigh between 3 billion and 100 billion solar masses, has been found. For details, see: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2020/a2261/

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of AT2020xnd, which is a follow-up to a Target of Opportunity accepted on Oct 26 and is coordinated with NuSTAR, an observation of ESO253-G003, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Nov 18, observations of PSRB1259-63, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Oct 19, and an observation of GRB201214B, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Dec 16.



------------------------------------------
        2RXSJ202850.9+21410    ACIS-S       Dec 20
        M51                    ACIS-S       Dec 21
        Radiation Belts
        3CR141                 ACIS-S       Dec 22
        HD185239               HRC-I
        GRB201214B             ACIS-S
        M82X-2                 HRC-I
        2MASSJ05215658+4359    ACIS-S
        H1821+643              HRC-S /LETG  Dec 23
        3CR125                 ACIS-S
        AT2020xnd              ACIS-S
        Radiation Belts                     Dec 24
        PSRB1259-63            ACIS-I
        OrionNebulaCluster     ACIS-S/HETG
        PSRB1259-63            ACIS-I       Dec 25
        OrionNebulaCluster     ACIS-S/HETG
        PSRB1259-63            ACIS-I       Dec 26
        ESO253-G003            ACIS-S
        2MASSJ05215658+4359    ACIS-S
        Radiation Belts                     Dec 27
        NGC4485/90             ACIS-S

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

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

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