GCN Circular 6825

Neil Gehrels (NASA-GSFC) reports on behalf of the Swift team:

This is an update on Swift status following earlier Circulars 
(Gehrels 6760; Barthelmy et al. 6781; Burrows et al. 6791).  The 
current instrument status is that BAT is fully turned on with all 
triggers enabled, XRT is fully turned on and performing science 
observations and calibrations, and UVOT is turned off for 
approximately one additional week depending on spacecraft slew 
performance testing this week.

Limited autonomous slewing to new GRBs was reinstated this week (Sept 24).
Initially the Automated Target (AT) mode is only being enabled during
normal working hours of the flight operations team at the Penn State
operations center.  Several methods for improving the slew accuracy
of the redundant gyro system now in use are being tested to enable
full-time AT slewing.

An experiment to lower the BAT trigger threshold in order to detect 
weaker bursts was originally planned for the current time frame.  It 
is now delayed and will occur no sooner than the end of the year.

More information will follow as we continue to recover observatory capability.