Summary of the Hinode/XRT Focus Mode Observation in January, 2014
(by Aki Takeda, 4, February 2014)
1. Focus Mode Operation.
From the period, 10th January through 7th February, 2014, Hinode mission
performed the first exploratory operation, called "Focus Mode".
The main purpose of this mode is to reduce the workload of the COs
to minimize the operational cost of the Hinode mission.
It is also important to evaluate the scientific output (i.e., data quality)
from this operational mode.
2. Summary of the observation during the FMO.
- week 1 : 11-Jan through 18-Jan,
pointing file
AR11944, AR11949, N-pole, HOP 79(NS scan), etc.
- week 2 : 18-Jan through 24-Jan,
pointing file
AR11952, Full-sun(112 hours), S-pole, HOP 79(EW scan), etc.
- week 3 : 24-Jan through 1-Feb,
pointing file
AR11959, Bakeout, HOP 130(15 pointings), Full-sun(4 hours), etc.
- week 4 : 1-Feb through 8-Feb,
pointing file
AR11967, N-pole, etc.
summary of the AR observations
[Analysis of the FM operation]
- For the AR tracking, COs need to assume the solar activity
in the next 10 days. It is often difficult to observe the most active
or interesting region at the time especially later in the week.
- Tracking an AR for one week with AEC on is a potentially dangerous
operation for XRT (i.e., the target might get lost its brightness,
that results in CCD damage due to overexposure).
- It is hard to use high cadence due to memory and telemetry limit.
- A new CO (possibly, after a long absence from XRT operation)
prepares a week-long timeline as his/her first job in the week.
Such timelines prone to include some mistakes. Once the timeline
with small mis-operation is uploaded, it will not be corrected
for a week (unless it's so dangerous that the team decided to correct
with additional operation.)
[My comments]
- Observing with a wide FOV (hopefully with full FOV) would reduce
the risk of CCD damage, and also the failure to catch the sight of
the most interested region.
- Reducing the number of synoptic program to once per day will
impair the usefulness of the XRT data during the FMO.
It is preferable that XRT_CO requests to include synoptic programs
(at least 2 times/day), when the max number of pointing allows.
Or, propose to set aside few hours of disk-center pointing each day.
- If we keep observing ARs with less synoptics images during the
FMO, it (no matter what it is called) means degraded version of the
past/current XRT obeservaion. However, IF we take significantly more
full-sun images during the FMO, we could add a new value to the XRT
data.