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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.




NICER Activities

Early Post-Launch NICER activities

  • 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

Latest News

  • NICER is Back in Operation (21 Oct 2019)
    NICER is operating normally after stowing for last week's ISS operations.
  • NICER Stowed Due to ISS Operations (15 Oct 2019)
    In support of ISS operations, NICER has been stowed since Sunday, October 13. As a result, NICER is not currently taking requests for Target of Opportunity observations. We anticipate that NICER observations will resume as soon as the ISS operations are completed.
  • NICER observations of the X-ray transient MAXI J1807+132: flaring activity (08 Oct 2019)
    NICER has been monitoring the X-ray transient MAXI J1807+132 regularly since September 16. During this time, NICER detected brief, sudden episodes of X-ray brightening which may be analogous to similar flaring behavior seen near the end of the 2017 outburst of the source.
  • NICER observes increasing luminosity from XTE J1739-285 (30 Sep 2019)
    From September 27 to September 30, NICER observed this newly active Galactic Center high-energy transient. The NICER observations show that the X-ray flux in the 0.1-10 keV band more than doubled over a timespan of about 3 days, with a coincident increase in black body temperature.
  • NICER observations of the X-ray transient MAXI J1807+132 (27 Sep 2019)
    NICER observations of the new X-ray transient MAXI J1807+132, discovered on September 10. The NICER observations show large variations from 200 NICER counts per second to 14 counts per second within a week. The nature of this source, based on this initial analysis (and on obsevations in other wavebands), is uncertain, and additional observations are planned.

[More NICER News]