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Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 1 April 2022 9.00am EDT

During the last week the Chandra schedule was interrupted by a high-radiation event that activated the science instrument safing sequence (SCS 107) and stopped observing at 8:40am EDT on Mar 28. All spacecraft actions were nominal. Owing to additional solar flares and the subsequent arrivals of Earth-directed coronal mass ejections, Chandra has remained with the science instruments safed. Planning efforts for the resumption of the observing schedule are on-going and observing will resume when the radiation environment settles. The schedule, with a planned start of Apr 4, is still in work. Observations that were impacted by the interruption will be rescheduled.

Realtime procedures were executed on Mar 28 to disable SCS 29, and on Mar 30 to update the observation identifier number to aid CXCDS processing.

A Chandra press release was issued on Mar 25 announcing the selection of 24 new Fellows for the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP). The program enables outstanding postdoctoral scientists to pursue independent research in any area of NASA Astrophysics, using theory, observation, experimentation, or instrument development. Each fellowship provides the awardee up to three years of support. The Space Telescope Science Institute administers the NHFP on behalf of NASA, in collaboration with the Chandra X-ray Center and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. For details see: https://chandra.si.edu/press/22_releases/press_032522fellowships.html

A Chandra image release was issued on Mar 31 describing almost 200 hours of Chandra observations of the "Spiderweb" galaxy (also known as J1140-2629), located about 10.6 billion light years from Earth, at the center of a protocluster, a growing collection of galaxies and gas that will eventually evolve into a galaxy cluster. Analyzed together with optical data from the Hubble and Subaru telescopes, the Chandra data reveal an unusually large number of massive galaxies with actively growing black holes, between five and twenty times higher than the fraction found for other galaxies of a similar age and with about the same range of masses. For details see: https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2022/spiderweb/





All spacecraft subsystems except HRC continued to support nominal operations.

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