NICER observation list: Target ID 658802

Black holes in X-ray binary systems are among the brightest objects in the X-ray sky. Outbursting BHs in transient systems exhibit a characteristic Q- or turtle-shaped pattern when plotted on a hardness-intensity diagram. This pattern encodes a rich set of spectral-timing state transitions characteristic of a BH's outburst. This proposal aims to establish a legacy data archive of weekly NICER monitoring of these turtle-diagrams. Our proposed program fills in coverage gaps arising from proposals which serve more narrow scientific goals, and which often do not monitor the entirety of an outburst. We argue, on the basis of the ongoing impact of the RXTE BH data archive, that it is imperative to leverage NICER's high-throughput soft-X-ray sensitivity against the full outburst.