During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned.

A real-time procedure was executed on Sep 9 to uplink stored command sequences needed for a special activity on Sep 13 to warm the Aspect Camera Assembly CCD while pointing at the Pleiades constellation. This is intended to anneal radiation damage in the CCD. A second real-time procedure was executed during the annealing activity on Sep 13 to raise the CCD temperature from +15 C to +20 C to enhance the annealing effect.

A Chandra press release was issued on Sep 14 describing the first detection of X-rays from Pluto. Since Pluto is cold, rocky, and without a magnetic field, it has no natural mechanism for emitting X-rays. In conjunction with data from the flyby of NASA's New Horizon spacecraft showing that Pluto's atmosphere is quite stable, the detection represents an interesting challenge to understand. For details see: http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/16_releases/press_091416.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below.