Since January 10 the Startracker 1 shows a different behaviour. This lead to a minor shortening of some of the observations, while a few targets were lost. The cause of this behaviour is not yet understood. Different problems with commanding and the data handling onboard caused a loss of data in several other cases. Presently it is not clear how far operational aspects or a changed hardware behaviour can be made responsible for the difficulties.
Investigations are under way.
The deadline for AO-4 proposals closed one day ago. In the next issue we will report on the details. The PSPC detector response matrix released mid of December appears to work fine with most of the spectra. The processing of current observations is complete until January 19, when a spacecraft clock reset was commanded.