Health and cleanliness of the XMM-Newton science payload since launch

Abstract

On December 10th 2004 the XMM-Newton observatory celebrated its 5th year in orbit. Since the beginning of the mission steady health and contamination monitoring has been performed by the XMM-Newton SOC and the instrument teams. Main targets of the monitoring, using scientific data for all instruments on board, are the behaviour of the Charge Transfer Efficiency, the gain, the effective area and the bad, hot and noisy pixels. The monitoring is performed by combination of calibration observations using internal radioactive calibration sources with observations of astronomical targets. In addition a set of housekeeping parameters is continuously monitored reflecting the health situation of the instruments from an engineering point of view. We show trend behaviour over the 5 years especially in combination with events like solar flares and other events affecting the performance of the instruments.