Monitoring the health and safety of the ACIS instrument on board the Chandra X-ray Observatory

Shanil N. Virani; Peter G. Ford; Joseph M. DePasquale; Paul P. Plucinsky

doi:10.1117/12.460672

2 January 2002 Monitoring the Health and Safety of the ACIS Instrument On-Board the Chandra X-ray Observatory

Shanil N. Virani, Peter G. Ford, Joseph M. DePasquale, Paul P. Plucinsky

Proceedings Volume 4844, Observatory Operations to Optimize Scientific Return III; (2002) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.460672
Event: Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, 2002, Waikoloa, Hawai'i, United States

Abstract

The Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), NASA's latest "Great Observatory", was launched on July 23, 1999 and reached its final orbit on August 7, 1999. The CXO is in a highly elliptical orbit, approximately 140,000 km × 10,000 km, and has a period of approximately 63.5 hours (≈2.65 days). Communication with the CXO nominally consists of 1-hour contacts spaced 8-hours apart. Thus, once a communication link has been established, it is very important that the health and safety status of the scientific instruments as well as the Observatory itself be determined as quickly as possible. In this paper, we focus exclusively on the automated health and safety monitoring scripts developed for the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) during those 1-hour contacts. ACIS is one of the two focal plane instruments on-board the CXO. We present an overview of the real-time ACIS Engineering Data Web Page and the alert schemes developed for monitoring the instrument status during each communication contact. A suite of HTML and PERL scripts monitors the instrument hardware house-keeping electronics (i.e., voltages and currents) and temperatures during each contact. If a particular instrument component is performing either above or below pre- established operating parameters, a sequence of email and alert pages are spawned to the Science Operations Team of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center so that the anomaly can be quickly investigated and corrective actions taken if necessary. We also briefly discuss the tools used to monitor the real-time science telemetry reported by the ACIS flight software. The authors acknowledge support for this research from NASA contract NAS8-39073.

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Shanil N. Virani, Peter G. Ford, Joseph M. DePasquale, and Paul P. Plucinsky "Monitoring the Health and Safety of the ACIS Instrument On-Board the Chandra X-ray Observatory", Proc. SPIE 4844, Observatory Operations to Optimize Scientific Return III, (2 January 2002); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.460672

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KEYWORDS

Observatories

Safety

Space operations

Charge-coupled devices

X-rays

Data communications

Sensors

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