NICER Mission Timeline

Current Activity

Please see Upcoming and recent past pointings for
up-to-date NICER observation scheduling.

July 13 Begin Science Program
June 21-July 12 Initial calibration and hardware commissioning
June 17 NICER uses Raster scan of Serpens X-1 to determine X-ray instrument and star tracker alignment
June 14 NICER is powered up, NICER is deployed, NICER range of motion is verified by robotic camera
June 12-13 NICER is installed on the ISS ELC2
June 11 2017 NICER is extracted from the Dragon trunk

NICER XTI CALDB Updated (20 Jul 2021)
The NICER XTI caldb has been updated to version 20210707. This version updates the detector gain, response and effective area of the XTI and other files.
NICER detection of possibly periodic X-ray absorption dips in MAXI J1803-298 (06 May 2021)
New NICER observations of the X-ray transient MAXI J1803-298 shows recurrent absorption dips in the lightcurve similar to dips seen in other high-inclination X-ray binaries, and suggest a possible orbital period of 7-8 hours.
NICER follow-up observations of MAXI J1803-298 (05 May 2021)
Continuing NICER observations of the new X-ray transient MAXI J1803-298 show temporal and spectral properties suggestive of a hard state accreting stellar-mass black hole than a neutron star, though confirmation is still needed.
NICER detection of periodicity in the new X-ray transient MAXI J0901-531 (19 Apr 2021)
NICER observation of the newly-discovered X-ray transient MAXI J0901-531 found periodic X-ray variations with a period of P = 14.055 seconds, consistent with the gamma-ray period seen by Fermi.
NICER Finds X-ray Boosts in the Crab Pulsar's Radio Bursts (08 Apr 2021)
A global science collaboration using data from NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope has discovered X-ray surges accompanying radio bursts from the pulsar in the Crab Nebula. The finding shows that these giant radio pulses release far more energy than previously suspected.