News by Date
News by Category
Solar System
Stars
White Dwarfs
Supernovas
Neutron Stars
Black Holes
Milky Way Galaxy
Normal Galaxies
Quasars
Galaxy Clusters
Cosmology/Deep Field
Miscellaneous
Press Resources
Status Reports
Press Advisories
Image Releases
Release Guidelines
Image Use Policy
NASA TV
Biographies/Interviews
Web Shortcuts
Chandra Blog
RSS Feed
Chronicle
Email Newsletter
News & Noteworthy
Image Use Policy
Questions & Answers
Glossary of Terms
Download Guide
Get Adobe Reader
Chandra @ NASA
Visit the Chandra pages at the NASA portal (opens in new window)
Image Use
Image Use Policy & Request Form
Guidelines for utilizing images, applets, movies, and animations featured in this Web Site.
Operations CXO Status Report

Friday 24 April 2020 9.00am EDT

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

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

A Chandra press release was issued on Apr 23 describing observations of a star that had a close encounter with a supermassive black hole and survived. Based on X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, it appears that a red giant star was captured by the strong gravity of the black hole and then was stripped of its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf in a 9-hour orbit. During each orbit the black hole strips more material from the white dwarf, releasing a periodic burst of X-rays. For details see: https://chandra.harvard.edu/press/20_releases/press_042320.html

Of note this week was the release on Apr 22 of CIAO Scripts package 4.12.2. The release includes several important updates, primarily to address changes introduced in the DS 10.8.3 update, which is the underlying software running the standard processing pipeline on new observations. For more details see: https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/ciao/download/scripts/history.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of SDSS J082905.98+420204.3, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Apr 8, an observation of PKS 0620-52, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Feb 5, and an observation of C/2019 Y4 ATLAS, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Apr 10.



------------------------------------------
        PKS0620-52             ACIS-I       Apr 27
        SPT-CLJ1315-2806       ACIS-I
        Radiation Belts                     Apr 28
        SDSSJ082905.98+4202    ACIS-S
        C/2019Y4ATLAS (9)      HRC-S /LETG
        IC4296                 HRC-I
        OrionNebulaCluster     ACIS-S/HETG  Apr 29
        IC4296                 HRC-I
        Terzan1                ACIS-S       Apr 30
        Radiation Belts
        SPT-CLJ1315-2806       ACIS-I
        IC4296                 HRC-I        May  1
        H1821+643              ACIS-S
        OrionNebulaCluster     ACIS-S/HETG
        SPT-CLJ1315-2806       ACIS-I       May  2
        SDSSJ082905.98+4202    ACIS-S
        Spiderweb              ACIS-S
        Radiation Belts                     May  3
        CentaurusA             ACIS-I
        H1821+643              ACIS-S

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

All spacecraft subsystems continued to support nominal operations.

Return to Status Reports