GCN Circular 16685

Jamie A. Kennea (PSU) on behalf of the Swift Mission Operations Center 
reports:

The Swift Mission Operations Center (MOC), located near the Penn State 
University Park campus, is planning to move to a new office building on 
Tuesday August 26th starting at 8:00am Eastern Time (12:00 UT). This move 
is expected to take no more than 72 hours to complete.

In the week leading up to the move (from Tuesday August 19th), the Swift 
schedulers will be creating science plans with a longer lead time than 
usual. This will affect our ability to schedule TOO requests into the 
observing plan at the last minute, so we ask that requesters consider this 
when submitting TOOs during this period and submit earlier if possible.

During the move itself, we will not accept any new TOO requests, Swift 
will not perform automated XRT/UVOT observations of BAT triggers (we will 
continue to distribute BAT GRB detections through GCN), and the Penn State 
Swift website will be offline.

A program of pre-planned observations will be performed by Swift during 
the period of the move, so science data will continue to be collected. 
However, until the MOC is operational, data taken during this period will 
not be delivered to the Swift Science Data Center, so there will be a 
delay in being able to obtain the processed data products from these 
observations.

At the end of the 72 hour period, we expect all Swift capabilities to be 
fully restored. However, it is likely that some capabilities will return 
sooner than that.