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 and NuSTAR observations of the Blazar BL Lac (15 Oct 2020)
NICER and NuSTAR obtained director's discretionary observations of the blazar BL Lac after its historical optical-to-gamma ray maximum. The NICER & NuSTAR spectrum can be fit with a broken power law, and these observations confirm the active state of the source.
NICER detects pulsations from a new outburst of the accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar IGR J17379-3747 (01 Oct 2020)
New NICER observations of the re-activated accreting pulsar IGR J17379-3747 recovered the 468 Hz spin period of the pulsar and made a new measurement of the change in the orbital period.
X-ray flaring of the nuclear transient AT2019avd (23 Sep 2020)
Swift and NICER observations of the galactic nuclear transient discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility shows that the source X-ray brightness increased 1000-fold over the last 5 years and show unusual X-ray properties.
X-ray Brightening of AT2019wey (10 Aug 2020)
NICER and Swift have obtained X-ray observations of AT2019wey, a new transient discovered by Spektr-RG. Both NICER and Swift show continued increasing emission through August 9 from this putative accreting binary.
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.