NICER Mission Timeline

Current Activity

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

The phase 1 proposal deadline for Cycle 2 of
NICER's Guest Observer program is:
4:30 pm ET on Wednesday, November 13, 2019.

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 (27 Jul 2020)
The NICER XTI caldb has been updated to version 20200722. This version updates the detector gain, response and effective area of the XTI.
NICER X-ray observations of the Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) candidate AT2020ocn (13 Jul 2020)
NICER has been monitoring the X-ray evolution of the likely TDE event, AT2020ocn.
NICER detection of pulsations from RX J0529.8-6556 (23 Jun 2020)
After the SRG/eROSITA discovery of a strong outburst from the LMC Be/X-ray binary RX J0529.8-6556, NICER followup observations discovered a period of 68s, indicating that the pulsar has been spinning up over the last 20 years.
Version 0p5 of the NICER Space Weather Background Tool Released (22 Jun 2020)
Version v0p5 of the nicer_bkg_estimator software has been released. This version fixes an issue with the calculation of the deadtime correction and also updates the EXPOSURE time keyword in the primary and GTI extension headers
NICER observes the tail of a long-duration X-ray burst in the direction of MAXI J0911-655 (26 May 2020)
NICER observations in the region including the intermittent accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar MAXI J0911-655 show a decrease in temperature consistent with the cooling tail of a thermonuclear X-ray burst from the neutron star.