Safety Acquisitions: Redundancy for non-repeatable multi-orbit STIS visits

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the frequency of guide star acquisition failures in HST STIS observations and evaluates the effectiveness of placing redundant acquisition sequences to ensure accurate pointing in non-repeatable, time-sensitive astronomical observations.

Contribution

It introduces a method of using redundant acquisition sequences in multi-orbit visits to mitigate guide star acquisition failures and improve pointing accuracy for critical observations.

Findings

Guide star acquisition failures occur in about 5% of cases, rising to 9% recently.

Approximately 39% of multi-orbit failed visits never obtain guide star lock.

Most successful recoveries happen before the second orbit's science exposures.

Abstract

For observations of supernovae, kilonovae, tidal disruption events, and other non-repeatable observations, it is important the science data is taken successfully within a specific time window. Part of obtaining that data is often centering objects in the aperture to a higher accuracy than is available from Hubble Space Telescope's (HST's) blind pointing. On HST STIS the sequence of exposures responsible for this centering is the target acquisition or STIS ACQ sequence, and it is most often placed only at the beginning of a visit. Unfortunately, STIS ACQ sequences will fail if the observatory experiences issues locating guide stars in time for the start of the required exposures. If the guide stars are located at a later point in the visit, the remaining science exposures can be taken but the pointing might not be as accurate as is required. This work discusses both the frequency of this issue and the feasibility of placing redundant or "safety" STIS ACQ sequences in a multi-orbit visit to regain the desired pointing accuracy in an affected visit. To do so we select a subset of all 113 STIS ACQ sequences from September 2018 to September 2023 which have experienced this issue. We find that this problem occurs in ~5% of the total STIS ACQ sequences taken during that time period, with a recent increase in the rate to ~9% from March to September 2023. Since the observatory goes through periods of better or worse pointing performance, this recent increased failure rate is not guaranteed to continue. For those failed visits which span multiple orbits, ~39% never obtain a lock on the guide stars and thus take no data. Of the multi-orbit visits that do recover the guide stars, the majority (~78%) do so before the beginning of science exposures in the second orbit. We also provide advice for users on how to make a risk assessment based on the analysis presented here.