RHESSI Tohban report, 21-oct-2002 to 28-oct-2002

R. Schwartz, richard@ssl.berkeley.edu
H. Hudson, hhudson@ssl.berkeley.edu

1. Solar Activity:

Two M-class flares, but actually quite a lot of activity. A very nice
gradual event on October 25, strikingly similar to Bastille 2000 as
viewed by EIT.  While only an M flare, it still loaded up the SSR
by 15% or so because of its soft spectrum.

2. Coordinated obervations:

The MEDOC campaign ended. We had pretty much succeeded in keeping the 
shutter in A013 mode, except for perhaps two days. Santiago and
Weilheim were available after the campaign began. Tohbans and any
others are encouraged to let Manfred and Mark know as soon as there
is any hint of a coordination so that they can help find additional
ground-station passes.

3. Memory Managment:

Some 50% decimation level every day.

4. Intentional Data Gaps:

20-Oct-2002 22:40  21-oct-2002 06:03  Read pointer
23-Oct-2002 04:15  23-Oct-2002 04:39  ADP experiment
23-Oct-2002 20:00  24-Oct-2002 00:00  Read pointer

5. Miscellaneous

At the Monday meeting, there was extensive discussion of the issues
of shutter management and how to deal with the superstorms, following
as well as we could David Smith's e-mail of October 16. The decision
was made to proceed with the simplest possible improvement to the
shutter algorithm, namely to change the "shutter back out" thresholds.
They are now at 99.0% and 98.0% levels, respectively, for the two
shutters. The on-board software, Peter reported, does not have the
best possible precision for this determination.

Regarding superstorms, Peter will work out a scheme to decimate and
stop front counts during storm times and will report back.

6. Problems

The status page sometimes has incomplete data. On the first pass
Saturday, ITOS crashed and no status update was possible. This sort
of thing becomes more important as the operators withdraw from 
peronal appearances at the MOC.

7. Tohbans

H. Hudson will be tohban this week, meanwhile training up new 
recruits Amir Caspi and Satoshi Masuda (the latter must have
been a tohban a hundred times or so for Yohkoh!).