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 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.
NICER observations of GRO J1008-57 (21 May 2020)
NICER has observed X-ray emission from the Be/X-ray binary system GRO J1008-57 during its current outburst. NICER finds a pulsation period of 93.205 with a spin period consistent with that measured at higher energies by the Fermi/GBM instrument. The spectrum is consistent with comptonized emission from an accretion disk with plus a blackbody, along with partial-covering absorption.
X-ray monitoring of the active magnetar SGR 1935+2154 (12 May 2020)
NuSTAR, Swift and NICER are monitoring the current X-ray outburst of the soft gamma-ray repeater, SGR 1935+2154
Burst forest from SGR 1935+2154 as detected with NICER (28 Apr 2020)
NICER observed the bursting magnetar SGR 1935+2154 in a series of observations. The NICER lightcurve shows over 100 bursts within a 1 kilosec observation.
NICER sees the Shortest X-ray Recovery of Eta Carinae (15 Apr 2020)
NICER observations of the last X-ray minimum of Eta Car show that it began on Feb 13, 2020, and ended on March 15, 2020. This X-ray minimum is now the shortest on record.