STATUS:
10.01.08
Spacecraft Status
The AIM spacecraft continues to operate nominally with the exception of the uplink receiver. Uplink receiver bitlock remains sporadic with only a few minutes of bitlock every few days. Our 3rd longest ever period without bitlock occurred this month – 6 days. We did achieve several major milestones this month. On Sept 5th we completed our 500th day on orbit and on Sept 9th AIM achieved orbit number 7,500.
Instrument Status
The SOFIE instrument continues to operate nominally. The SOFIE non-linearity calibrations have been changed to include both types of events instead of only one. Previously, only the events in the PMC hemisphere (e.g. northern hemisphere events during the northern hemisphere summer) were used in the calibration. From September 9, 2008 forward both hemispheres will be used in the calibration.
Version 1 data processing, validation, and release to the public has continued without any problems. The SOFIE web site provides an excellent tool to look at plots of the data. Documentation to help understand the data is also available on the web site. As previously noted, the 13 arcmin data used in calibration studies is not available to the public in Release 1. Testing of Version 2 is underway and full production should begin
very shortly. Validation and release to the public of the new Release 2 data will be a top priority. Documentation describing the new data and the software improvements will be made available to public.
CIPS continues to operate nominally with all four cameras returning excellent data.
CDE is operating nominally. We performed a series of stim tests and now have that data in hand to be analyzed. A few modifications to the ground processing pipeline have been implemented to fix a problem of quaternion gaps.
|