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STATUS:
03.01.09
Spacecraft Status
The spacecraft recovered from safehold and went back in science operations on Feb 12. Uplink receiver bitlock remains sporadic with only a few minutes of bitlock every few days. We did reach a major milestone on Feb 24 at 6:33am MST – AIM completed its 10,000 orbit!
Instrument Status
New SOFIE reset and power-on/reset RTS's on-board AIM have been ground testing and analyzed. Modifications have been made to the RTS's to mitigate an issue where the command and data handling board does not load the correct image following a reset. The new RTS's are awaiting approval before uploading to AIM.
Validation of V1.022 has begun. The data products do exhibit improvements as expected, and this new data will be made available to the public beginning in the next few days.
The final draft of the SOFIE meteoric smoke paper was completed and circulated among the coauthors for review, with submission to Science anticipated in early March. Papers describing the relationships between PMCs and temperature and H2O, and the SOFIE refraction measurements are in preparation.
CIPS was turned back on successfully at 3:30am MT on 9 February after the latest safe hold. Clouds were still visible in images after this turn-on, until 17 February. No clouds have been observed since 17 February; this is likely indicative of the approaching end-of-season. It should be noted, however, that this is only a qualitative, not quantitative, analysis that could be affected by uncertainties in preliminary background subtractions.
The “daily daisies” for the current version of the retrieval algorithm, v3.20, have been re-plotted for all seasons using a new approach that was developed to empirically remove background subtraction artifacts. These daisies are currently being evaluated, and remaining artifacts are being documented in preparation for posting to the web site.
We are continuing to design systematic evaluation procedures that will be applied to all data levels, as well as the accompanying documentation. Preliminary evaluation of v3.20 levels 1a, 3, and 4, as well as CV data and “summary files” of level 4 data have been carried out. Results are promising, but more comprehensive evaluation and documentation is required before they are released.
CDE was turned on February 9th following the February 5th safehold event. CDE returned to normal operations and continues to take data.
AIM's One Millionth CIPS Image
02.21.09
The one millionth CIPS image of any kind was taken on Saturday, 21 Feb 2009 at 17:26:31UTC (10:26:31 AM Mountain time). It was an MX normal science image taken during orbit 9957, while the spacecraft was at 62.5S, 94.0W, over the South Pacific Ocean near South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. All four cameras snapped simultaneously at that time, but this one is in row one million in the database. No clouds are immediately apparent in this image, but it is an MX image, so the clouds are dimmest here. |
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