• NICER in the News: Mushroom Clouds on Neutron Stars (23 Apr 2018)
  NICER was featured in an on-line publication by LiveScience on the ability to study photospheric radius expansion bursts, or "mushroom clouds" occurring on neutron stars.
• NICER XTI CALDB Updated to Version 20180417 (18 Apr 2018)
  The NICER XTI caldb has been updated to version 20180417. Please make sure you're using the most recent version of the caldb.config file in order to access the NICER XTI CALDB data.
• NICER Session at the American Physical Society Meeting (17 Apr 2018)
  A special session featuring NICER first results was held at the April 2018 meeting of the American Physical Society. Two results, "Scientists Spot the Shadow of a Strange Wind Blowing Past a Black Hole" and "NASA's Got a Plan for a 'Galactic Positioning System' to Save Astronauts Lost in Space", were featured stories on LIVESCIENCE.
• NICER ATEL: NICER observations of MAXI J1820+070 suggest a rapidly-brightening black hole X-ray binary in the hard state (15 Mar 2018)
  NICER observed the new X-ray transient MAXI J1820+070. The light curve shows large amplitude flaring on a time-scale of minutes. The X-ray spectrum shows a hard power-law spectrum and a low temperature disk blackbody component, while timing analysis shows a large amplitude broadband power spectrum. These characteristics strongly suggest that the source is a black hole X-ray binary that is rapidly increasing in flux through the canonical hard state.
• NICER Archive Opens (08 Mar 2018)
  NICER was launched to the International Space Station on June 3, 2017, and began regular observations of celestial sources on July 17, upon completion of its commissioning activities. While observations to fulfill the mission's baseline science are ongoing, most data acquired to date -- during an initial validation period lasting nearly 8 months -- are now available in the public archive at the HEASARC. The archive includes over 3000 observations that have been processed with the latest instrument calibration products and software, also now released, and are accessible through the HEASARC's archive interfaces. Excluded are datasets for a few targets, to be released at a later date after evaluation of long-term calibration stability. Following this initial release, new observations will be delivered to the archive regularly after a two-week processing and validation period.

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