The commanded pitch of the Aqua spacecraft to allow for a deep space calibration including the Moon was completed on September 24, 2021. The MODIS instrument successfully viewed the moon through its earth view (EV) port. MCST monitored the instrument health throughout the maneuver and continues to monitor telemetry. Analysis of the calibration is ongoing.

Terra flight operations successfully reset the spacecraft solid state recorder (SSR) on September 22, 2021. Among other benefits, this reset returns the Terra MODIS onboard data storage to its full capacity. For more information see the article on the NASA EOS Terra website here.

MCST is preparing for an Aqua lunar deep space calibration (LDSC) on 2021/266 (September 23, 2021). This spacecraft pitch maneuver will allow MODIS to view the Moon through the EV port. In order to facilitate this maneuver, there will be outages of science data in the approximate range of 0900-11:00z. The maneuver will also affect the temperature of the MODIS cold focal planes, which may take ~20 hours to stabilize post-maneuver.

MCST is preparing for a Terra flight operations activity designed to reset the spacecraft solid state recorder (SSR). If successful, this will recover the lost on-orbit data storage for MODIS and the other instruments. The reset will require science data recording to be suspended for most of day 2021/265 (September 22, 2021) and potentially into the following day.

On June 29, 2021, at 12:20:45z, printed wire assembly (PWA) #47 of the Terra spacecraft buffer failed. This PWA was allocated to the MODIS instrument.  Because of this failure, the onboard data storage for MODIS science data has been reduced. On July 2nd, MODIS IOT performed tests on reducing the Terra MODIS data rate to accommodate this change. Starting July 3 at 20:00:00z, the tests were completed, and the data rate continued at the pre-PWA failure schedule, which began on May 2, 2021.