18 Mar 2008 10:56

Operations and Archiving

At its 120th meeting the SPC approved an extension of operations until 31 December 2012 with the Mission Operations team being combined with that of XMM-Newton from 1 January 2008 in order to improve efficiency. This means that one spacecraft controller is now operating both spacecraft, rather than the two spacecraft and one XMM-Newton instrument controller required previously. This revised operations concept, which includes a combined engineering support team, has been thoroughly tested over the last few months and is working smoothly with routine workloads that are comfortably handled by a single controller.

Following a recommendation from the Science Working Team the pattern of pointing positions on the sky that INTEGRAL performs has been modified slightly in order to further reduce systematic effects visible in deep sky mosaic ISGRI images. For most observations INTEGRAL performs sets of 25 individual pointings arranged in square 5×5 patterns around the target of interest. From 24 November 2007 each set of 5×5 pointings will be slightly rotated on the sky with respect to the previous pattern.

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This report is based on the January SPC submission. Please see the copyright section of the legal disclaimer (bottom of this page) for terms of use.