Status Report

NASA Hubble Space Telescope Daily Report #5138

By SpaceRef Editor
July 15, 2010
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HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE – Continuing to Collect World Class Science

DAILY REPORT #5138

PERIOD COVERED: 5am July 14 – 5am July 15, 2010 (DOY 195/09:00z-196/09:00z)

FLIGHT OPERATIONS SUMMARY:

Significant Spacecraft Anomalies: (The following are preliminary reports of potential non-nominal performance that will be investigated.)

HSTARS:

12328 – Loss of lock on FGS 1 occurred at 195/22:12:39z with recovery at 195/22:14:36z. FGS 2 lost lock at 195/22:12:39z with recovery at 195/22:15:05z. No slews were in progress at the time. GSAcq(1,2,1) at 195/22:03:07z was finished at 195/22:10:37z.

Observations possibly affected: COS 22-32, proposal ID#11527.

COMPLETED OPS REQUEST: (None)

COMPLETED OPS NOTES: (None)


SCHEDULED SUCCESSFUL FALURE TIME
FGS GSAcq 9 9
FGS REAcq 6 6
OBAD with Maneuver 7 7
LOSS of LOCK 195/22:12:39z

SIGNIFICANT EVENTS: (None)

OBSERVATIONS SCHEDULED:

ACS/WFC 11996

CCD Daily Monitor (Part 3)

This program comprises basic tests for measuring the read noise and dark current of the ACS WFC and for tracking the growth of hot pixels. The recorded frames are used to create bias and dark reference images for science data reduction and calibration. This program will be executed four days per week (Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun) for the duration of Cycle 17. To facilitate scheduling, this program is split into three proposals. This proposal covers 308 orbits (19.25 weeks) from 21 June 2010 to 1 November 2010.

COS/FUV 11527

COS-GTO: An Absorption Study of Galactic Intermediate Velocity Clouds Using Hot Stars in Globular Clusters

We shall use UV bright hot post-AGB stars located within the globular clusters of NGC 5139, NGC 6752, NGC 7078, NGC 6205, NGC 5272 and NGC 1904 to sample the UV absorption properties of the intervening line-of-sight interstellar gas. Such sight-lines pass through several intermediate velocity clouds (IVC?s) thought to be located within 5 kpc of our Galaxy, thus allowing the physical and chemical state of this gas to be probed and compared with the properties of interstellar gas located in the galactic disk. Elemental abundances of the IVC gas shall be derived in order to determine a possible origin for these in-falling galactic satellite cloud structures.

STIS/CC 11845

CCD Dark Monitor Part 2

Monitor the darks for the STIS CCD.

STIS/CC 11847

CCD Bias Monitor-Part 2

Monitor the bias in the 1×1, 1×2, 2×1, and 2×2 bin settings at gain=1, and 1×1 at gain = 4, to build up high-S/N superbiases and track the evolution of hot columns.

STIS/CCD 11849

STIS CCD Hot Pixel Annealing

This purpose of this activity is to repair radiation induced hot pixel damage to the STIS CCD by warming the CCD to the ambient instrument temperature and annealing radiation-damaged pixels.

Radiation damage creates hot pixels in the STIS CCD Detector. Many of these hot pixels can be repaired by warming the CCD from its normal operating temperature near -83 deg. C to the ambient instrument temperature (~ +5 deg. C) for several hours. The number of hot pixels repaired is a function of annealing temperature. The effectiveness of the CCD hot pixel annealing process is assessed by measuring the dark current behavior before and after annealing and by searching for any window contamination effects.

STIS/MA1/MA2 11857

STIS Cycle 17 MAMA Dark Monitor

This proposal monitors the behavior of the dark current in each of the MAMA detectors.

The basic monitor takes two 1380s ACCUM darks each week with each detector. However, starting Oct 5, pairs are only included for weeks that the LRP has external MAMA observations planned. The weekly pairs of exposures for each detector are linked so that they are taken at opposite ends of the same SAA free interval. This pairing of exposures will make it easier to separate long and short term temporal variability from temperature dependent changes.

For both detectors, additional blocks of exposures are taken once every six months. These are groups of five 1314s FUV-MAMA Time-Tag darks or five 3x315s NUV ACCUM darks distributed over a single SAA-free interval. This will give more information on the brightness of the FUV MAMA dark current as a function of the amount of time that the HV has been on, and for the NUV MAMA will give a better measure of the short term temperature dependence.

WFC3/IR/ACS/WFC 11663

Formation and Evolution of Massive Galaxies in the Richest Environments at 1.5 < z < 2.0 We propose to image seven 1.52 Damped Lyman Alpha Systems

We propose to directly image the star-forming regions of z>2 damped Lya systems (DLAs) using the WFC3/UVIS camera on the HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE. In contrast to all previous attempts to detect the galaxies giving rise to high redshift DLAs, we will use a novel technique that completely removes the glare of the background quasar. Specifically, we will target quasar sightlines with multiple DLAs and use the higher redshift DLA as a “blocking filter” (via Lyman limit absorption) to eliminate all FUV emission from the quasar. This will allow us to carry out a deep search for FUV emission from the lower redshift DLA, shortward of the Lyman limit of the higher redshift absorber. The unique filter set and high spatial resolution afforded by WFC3/UVIS will then enable us to directly image the lower redshift DLA and thus estimate its size, star- formation rate and impact parameter from the QSO sightline. We propose to observe a sample of 20 sightlines, selected primarily from the SDSS database, requiring a total of 40 HST orbits. The observations will allow us to determine the first FUV luminosity function of high redshift DLA galaxies and to correlate the DLA galaxy properties with the ISM characteristics inferred from standard absorption-line analysis to significantly improve our understanding of the general DLA population.

WFC3/UVIS 11905

WFC3 UVIS CCD Daily Monitor

The behavior of the WFC3 UVIS CCD will be monitored daily with a set of full-frame, four-amp bias and dark frames. A smaller set of 2Kx4K subarray biases are acquired at less frequent intervals throughout the cycle to support subarray science observations. The internals from this proposal, along with those from the anneal procedure (Proposal 11909), will be used to generate the necessary superbias and superdark reference files for the calibration pipeline (CDBS).

WFC3/UVIS 12018

Ultra-Luminous X-Ray Sources in the Most Metal-Poor Galaxies

There is growing observational and theoretical evidence to suggest that Ultra-Luminous X-ray sources (ULX) form preferentially in low metallicity environments. Here we propose a survey of 27 nearby (< 30Mpc) star-forming Extremely Metal Poor Galaxies (Z<5% solar). There are almost no X-ray observations of such low abundance galaxies (3 in the Chandra archive). These are the most metal-deficient galaxies known, and a logical place to find ULX if they favor metal-poor systems. We plan to test recent population synthesis models which predict that ULX should be very numerous in metal-poor galaxies. We will also test the hypothesis that ULX form in massive young star clusters, and ask for HST time to obtain the necessary imaging data.

SpaceRef staff editor.