I am deeply saddened to report the passing on December 3 of our friend and colleague Mike Juda from complications of renal cell carcinoma. He will be dearly missed as a critically important leader in our flight and science teams, serving as lead Flight Director and Mission Operations Manager. Mike will be remembered for his calm and thoughtful presence as a leader and a friend.

During a real-time pass on Dec 9 the ACIS Digital Processing Assembly Side-A (DPA-A) was detected in an unexpected powered-off state. Initial assessment from real-time telemetry indicated behavior consistent with prior cases where the DPA powered-down. In each of those cases a fault-tree analysis concluded the event was due to a single event upset. Analysis of recorder dump data will be done in order to confirm the initial assessment, determine the impact to science observations, and determine the recovery plan.

A real-time procedure was executed on Dec 7 to perform a routine self-check of the Electrical Interface Assembly (EIA) Sequencer.

A Chandra press release was issued on Dec 8 describing observations of SPT 0346-52, a recently-discovered galaxy that is undergoing an extraordinary boom of star formation. The high rate of star formation implies that a large reservoir of cool gas in the galaxy is being converted into stars with unusually high efficiency. The galaxy is 12.7 billion light years from Earth, seen at a critical stage in the evolution of galaxies about a billion years after the Big Bang. For details see: http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/16_releases/press_120816.html

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