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

Chandra passed through the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth eclipses of the season on Aug 16, 19, and 21 respectively, with nominal power and thermal performance.

A real-time procedure was executed on Aug 19 to perform a check-out of the B-side MUPS thrusters. The goal of the check-out was to clear the suspected gas bubbles from the lines feeding the thrusters on the hot side of the spacecraft, which had exhibited reduced thrust during the Aug 3 checkout. The two cold-side thrusters continued to perform at nominal thrust and one of the hot-side thrusters performed at nominal thrust by the end of the checkout. However, the second hot-side thruster, MUPS-B2, showed no thrust after after multiple firings. The cause for the lack of thrust on MUPS-B2 is under investigation. A flight software patch was uplinked on Aug 21 that will keep MUPS-A active for use in the case of a Safe Mode entry, avoiding the uncontrolled use of MUPS-B2.

Of note this week was the release on Aug 22 of CALDB 4.5.8. This update includes ACIS time-dependent gain corrections for the period May-July 2013. For details see: http://cxc.harvard.edu/caldb/downloads/Release_notes/CALDB_v4.5.8.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below