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PACE weekly commissioning update

Posted on Thursday, March 14, 2024 at 12:00:00

29 February through 13 March 2024

Instrument operations began in earnest the night of March 5, with OCI, SPEXone, and HARP2 entering an 8-day nominal science data collection period with daily solar calibrations! The data and imagery collected during this period (and for the coming weeks) are precursors to arriving at official Science First Light. While they will ultimately be shared, these data are actively being used to evaluate instrument performance and, thus, are not ready for distribution. But, as a preview, we're happy to report that all three instrument teams are very pleased with what they are seeing (with apologies for the suspense)!

On that note, the Science Data Segment continues to collect spacecraft and science data from all three instruments, with data processing working well. OCI even completed its first lunar calibration, with another planned for the end of March. Looking forward, several additional special tests will be conducted, followed by another 8-day nominal science data collection. These long runs have proven to be invaluable to fine tune operations and get hands-on knowledge of how to fly the spacecraft. Like we said two weeks ago, the game is ON!

Science data will start flowing publicly towards the end of our 60-day commissioning period. Our hope is to have science first light data release the first week of April. This will include a TBD subset of all the products that PACE will ultimately provide to the research community. We will of course, make sure you know exactly when.

In the meantime, to ready yourself for the forthcoming flow of data, see: https://pace.oceansciences.org/work_with_pace_data.htm.

Other information

This update is being sent to a series of mailing lists, while also being posted online:

https://pace.oceansciences.org/blog.htm

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https://pace.oceansciences.org/app_community.htm