NASA Hubble Space Telescope Daily Report #4217
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE DAILY REPORT # 4217
– Continuing to collect World Class Science
PERIOD COVERED: UT October 11, 2006 (DOY 284)
OBSERVATIONS SCHEDULED
ACS/HRC/WFC 10733
CCD Hot Pixel Annealing
Hot pixel annealing will continue to be performed once every 4 weeks. The CCD TECs will be turned off and heaters will be activated to bring the detector temperatures to about +20C. This state will be held for approximately 6 hours, after which the heaters are turned off, the TECs turned on, and the CCDs returned to normal operating condition. To assess the effectiveness of the annealing, a bias and four dark images will be taken before and after the annealing procedure for both WFC and HRC. The HRC darks are taken in parallel with the WFC darks. The charge transfer efficiency {CTE} of the ACS CCD detectors declines as damage due to on-orbit radiation exposure accumulates. This degradation has been closely monitored at regular intervals, because it is likely to determine the useful lifetime of the CCDs. We combine the annealling activity with the charge transfer efficiency monitoring and also merge into the routine dark image collection. To this end, the CTE monitoring exposures have been moved into this proposal . All the data for this program is acquired using internal targets {lamps} only, so all of the exposures should be taken during Earth occultation time {but not during SAA passages}. This program emulates the ACS pre-flight ground calibration and post-launch SMOV testing {program 8948}, so that results from each epoch can be directly compared. Extended Pixel Edge Response {EPER} and First Pixel Response {FPR} data will be obtained over a range of signal levels for both the Wide Field Channel {WFC}, and the High Resolution Channel {HRC}.
ACS/HRC/WFC 10758
ACS CCDs daily monitor
This program consists of a set of basic tests to monitor, the read noise, the development of hot pixels and test for any source of noise in ACS CCD detectors. The files, biases and dark will be used to create reference files for science calibration. This programme will be for the entire lifetime of ACS. Changes from cycle 13:- The default gain for WFC is 2 e-/DN. As before bias frames will be collected for both gain 1 and gain 2. Dark frames are acquired using the default gain {2}. This program cover the period May, 31 2006- Oct, 1-2006. The first half of the program has a different proposal number: 10729.
ACS/WFC 10633
GRB afterglows and host galaxies at very high redshifts
Cosmology is beginning to constrain the nature of the earliest stars and galaxies to form in the universe, but direct observation of galaxies at z>6 remains highly challenging due to their scarcity, intrinsically small size, and high luminosity distance. GRB afterglows, thanks to their extreme luminosities, offer the possibility of circumventing these normal constraints by providing redshifts and spectral information which couldn’t be obtained by direct observation of the hosts themselves. In addition, the association of GRBs with massive stars means that they are a tracer of star formation, and that their hosts are likely responsible for a large proportion of the ionizing radiation during that era. Our collaboration is mounting a campaign to rapidly identify and study candidate very high redshift bursts, bringing to bear a network of 2, 4 and 8m telescopes with nIR instrumentation. The capabilities of Swift to detect faint, distant GRBs, and to report accurate positions for many bursts in near real-time makes our program now feasible. HST is crucial to this endeavour, allowing us {a} to monitor the late time afterglows and hence compare them to lower-z bursts and test the use of GRBs as standard candles; and {b} characterise the basic properties, luminosities, and in some cases morphologies, of the hosts, which is essential to understanding these primordial galaxies and their relationship to other populations.
ACS/WFC 10824
Measuring the Shape and Orientation of the Galactic Dark-Matter Halo using Hypervelocity Stars
We propose to obtain high-resolution images of five hypervelocity stars in the Galactic halo in order to establish the first-epoch astrometric frame for them, as a part of a long-term program to measure precise proper motions. The origin of these recently discovered stars, all with positive radial velocities above 540 km/s, is consistent only with being ejected from the deep potential well of the massive black hole at the Galactic center. The deviations of their space motions from purely radial trajectories probe the departures from spherical symmetry of the Galactic potential, mainly due to the triaxiality of the dark-matter halo. Reconstructing the full three-dimensional space motion of the hypervelocity stars, through astrometric proper motions, provides a unique opportunity to measure the shape and orientation of the dark halo. The hypervelocity stars allow measurement of the potential up to 75 kpc from the center, independently of and at larger distances than are afforded by tidal streams of satellite galaxies such as the Sagittarius dSph galaxy. HVS3 may be associated with the LMC, rather then the Galactic center, and would therefore present a case for a supermassive black hole at the center of the LMC. We request one orbit with ACS/WFC for each of the five hypervelocity stars to establish their current positions relative to background galaxies. We will request a repeated observation of these stars in Cycle 17, which will conclusively measure the astrometric proper motions.
NIC1 11061
NICMOS Imaging of Grism Spectrophotometric Standards
In this program we will take imaging observations with all 3 cameras with a range of filters of a significant number of stars that are part of the spectroscopic standard star project. These stars will form the fainter reference star backbone for programs as JWST, Sophia, and SNAP. With this program we will: 1. Accurately calibrate relative brightness of standard stars, which can be done more accurately with photometry than with spectroscopy. This has been proven to be vary valuable to straighten out the problems in the spectroscopic data reduction and calibrations so far. 2. Increase the number of stars over a large magnitude range to provide a more accurate cross check of our count rate dependent non-linearity correction 3. Include stars with radically different {very red} spectra to investigate whether the filter curves as measured before flight are still valid by comparing the throughput estimates from these stars to those used for the standard calibration. 4. Repeat a few standard star observations from cycle 7 and post-NCS installation SMOV, to increase the accuracy in the change in sensitivity measurement with just a few observations thanks to the long baseline.
NIC1/NIC2/NIC3 8794
NICMOS Post-SAA calibration – CR Persistence Part 5
A new procedure proposed to alleviate the CR-persistence problem of NICMOS. Dark frames will be obtained immediately upon exiting the SAA contour 23, and every time a NICMOS exposure is scheduled within 50 minutes of coming out of the SAA. The darks will be obtained in parallel in all three NICMOS Cameras. The POST-SAA darks will be non-standard reference files available to users with a USEAFTER date/time mark. The keyword ‘USEAFTER=date/time’ will also be added to the header of each POST-SAA DARK frame. The keyword must be populated with the time, in addition to the date, because HST crosses the SAA ~8 times per day so each POST-SAA DARK will need to have the appropriate time specified, for users to identify the ones they need. Both the raw and processed images will be archived as POST-SAA DARKSs. Generally we expect that all NICMOS science/calibration observations started within 50 minutes of leaving an SAA will need such maps to remove the CR persistence from the science images. Each observation will need its own CRMAP, as different SAA passages leave different imprints on the NICMOS detectors.
NIC2 10825
The Formation Epoch of Early-type Galaxies: Constraints from the Fundamental Plane at z=1.3
Field and cluster surveys both show a ~50% decrease in the number of early-type galaxies at redshifts near 1. Galaxies that have either recently transformed into early-types or undergone star formation should have younger appearing stellar populations. The resulting change in the mass-to-light ratio can be detected by the offset in the fundamental plane with redshift. We will use the fundamental plane to test whether a significant fraction of early-type galaxies have evidence of recent star formation, using a sample of ~20 z=1.3 cluster and field early-type galaxies. This is 7 times larger than the sample previously used at this redshift. We already have the high signal-to-noise 12-20 hour long Keck spectra for these galaxies we need for velocity dispersions. To use the fundamental plane, we require sizes and surface brightnesses. We propose 12 orbits of NICMOS Camera 2 imaging to measure the sizes and surface brightness distributions of these objects in a rest-frame optical passband. These data will provide high quality surface brightness profiles out two ~2 half-light radii, at wavelengths comparable to previous fundamental plane studies. When combined with our spectra, the HST data will establish the mass-to-light ratio evolution for massive early-type galaxies from the fundamental plane. We will define the epoch of last star formation for these z=1.3 galaxies, directly testing the claims of strong evolution at z=1.
WFPC2 11027
Visible Earth Flats
This proposal monitors flatfield stability. This proposal obtains sequences of Earth streak flats to construct high quality flat fields for the WFPC2 filter set. These flat fields will allow mapping of the OTA illumination pattern and will be used in conjuction with previous internal and external flats to generate new pipeline superflats. These Earth flats will complement the Earth flat data obtained during cycles 4-14.
WFPC2 11028
WFPC2 Cycle 15 UV Earth Flats
Monitor flat field stability. This proposal obtains sequences of earth streak flats to improve the quality of pipeline flat fields for the WFPC2 UV filter set. These Earth flats will complement the UV earth flat data obtained during cycles 8-14.
FLIGHT OPERATIONS SUMMARY:
Significant Spacecraft Anomalies: (The following are preliminary reports of potential non-nominal performance that will be investigated.)
HSTARS: (None)
COMPLETED OPS REQUEST: (None)
COMPLETED OPS NOTES: (None)
SCHEDULED SUCCESSFUL
FGS GSacq 06 06
FGS REacq 09 09
OBAD with Maneuver 28 28
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS: (None)
