Status Report,   Friday, 18-oct-91
J. R. Lemen

The spacecraft was finally returned to fine sensor control yesterday
(Thu).  The SXT was turned on again and observations have resumed.  During the
period of Monday to Thursday the telemetry was completely allocated to
the attitude control system while the spacecraft software was updated
and tested.  The spacecraft pointing has gradually improved, however, we
are still waiting to received the processed pointing information which
will eventually be included in the reformatted data base.

Thanks to the efforts of a programmer at ISAS, Shuto san, we are
beginning to realize a simplier interface to the Sirius archive system.
It is now possible to run a program on the ISAS Sun workstation which
directly accesses the data base without the need of logging onto the
Facom mainframe.  The Sun workstation can remotely mount the data disks of our
fileserver, so it is becoming much easier to acquire the data.  A record
was set today in that we were able to review data that was only about
two hours old.  Typically, the data has been more than 24 hours old
before we have been able to access the most recent data.  We can only hope that
this will be the start of a very welcome trend.

Greg Slater has produced the first registered SXT movie using
developmental code.  Work in this area is hindered most by the lack of
processed spacecraft attitude data.  Plans are being discussed to make
use of raw IRU (the gyro's) data until the processed data becomes
available.  The IRU data appears to be very stable on short timescales.
Tomorrow we will try to deduce roll corrections.

This week Mons Morrison and I re-arranged the software directories
substantially.  Up to now, we have been making use of a "test"
configuration.  The new arrangement should make software development and
program use more straightforward and also facilitate distribution to
SXT co-investigators.  The most important software issue to report is
that Mons and Gary Linford have made considerable progress in getting
the Observing Log search routines on line.  It is now possible to search
the entire data base making selections based on exposure, filter,
resolution, field of view, etc.  Mons has written an upper level routine
called "TEST_SEA" which is being used to search the SXT data base.
These routines will soon have the capabilities of searching on various
BCS, WBS, and HXT parameters as well.  Eventually, these functions will
be available through DB_BROWSE.