Project and Study Scientist Reports for AWG # 129 (28-09-2007)

Report compiled, using inputs from Study and Project Scientists by Jean Clavel, head Astrophysics & Fundamental Physics Missions Division,

7. Satellites in orbit

7.1 HST: Antonella Nota The HST spacecraft continues to operate nominally after recovery from the safing event on August 31. HST entered Zero Gyro Sun Point (ZGSP) safe-mode following the failure of Gyro #2. Gyro #2 had accumulated more than 57000 hours of run time, well above average. Gyro #6 was successfully turned on, and scientific operations resumed. The observing efficiency remains high (~54%).

Activities continue in preparation of Servicing Mission 4 (SM4), currently planned for August 2008. The SM4 manifest includes two new instruments, the Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), as well as several life-extending items such as gyroscopes and batteries. The astronauts will also attempt to repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), which failed in August 2004, and the Advanced Camera for Survey (ACS), which failed in early 2007. Observing Cycle 17 is expected to initiate immediately after SM4 is completed. The deadline for submitting proposals for Cycle 17 will be March 7, 2008.

Science Highlight: This HST/ACS shows the dwarf galaxy NGC4449 undergoing a “starburst” event likely triggered by the interaction with a smaller companion galaxy.

A Workshop is being planned in Bologna, Italy, on January 29-31, to raise awareness about the expanded scientific capabilities of the HST after SM4. Goals of the Workshop will be: to inform the general astronomical community of the exciting scientific opportunities of the refurbished HST in the area of ultraviolet to near infrared imaging and spectroscopy; provide insight in and detailed information on the new HST imaging and spectroscopic capabilities and characteristics and general information about the mission; provide more detailed information about initial calibration observations, the COS Guaranteed Time (GTO) observing programs and plans for Early Release Observations (ERO) and Early Release Science (ERS) with both COS and WFC3; provide future GOs with details in the area of astronomical observation planning, data reduction, and data products and archiving. The workshop is being sponsored by INAF, in collaboration with ESA and NASA (STScI and ST- ECF). Additional information on this Workshop can be found at: http://www.iasfbo.inaf.it/bawhst/

7.2 XMM-Newton: Norbert Schartel The XMM-Newton observatory continues to operate nominally. As of September 3, the overall completion status of the observing programme is as follows: − AO-5 programme: 100.0 % (A and B priority) − AO-5 programme: 26.5 % (C priority) − AO-6 programme: 42.1 % (A and B priority) Completion of the AO-6 programme is expected by April 2008, in line with the planned start of AO-7 observations.

Several Targets-of-Opportunity were observed during the reporting period, namely SN 2005kd, AX J1749.1-2733, GRB 070411, 1E1048.1-5937, XMMSL1_J060636.2, Mkn 335, CXOM31 J004059.2+411551, 1E 1547.0-5408 and SN 2007gr.

About 130 scientists, more than twice the expected number, have participated in the XMM-Newton Scientific Workshop “XMM-Newton: the Next Decade”. The Project Scientist received only positive feedback, especially from the XMM-Newton Users Group. The proceedings of the workshop will be published as a regular issue of the oldest refereed astrophysical journal Astronomical Notes / Astronomische Nachrichten.

An XMM-Newton Users Group (UG) meeting was held on June 17 & 18 at ESAC, immediately after the workshop. The UG expressed its satisfaction with the overall project status and in particular with the outcome of the Mission extended operations review (MEOR). The UG was satisfied with the progress in calibration. Following on scientific needs expressed in the course of the workshop, the UG recommended the introduction of very large programs that require exposure times in the range of one to three mega-seconds. It also supports the introduction of proposals for target of opportunity observations in future announcements of opportunity. Up to now, ToO proposals were only possible for well defined classes of objects, such as Novae in outburst, with known coordinates and pre-defined observation triggering criteria, usually a flux threshold. These are the so-called “pre-planned” Targets of Opportunity. For other, less well defined events, referred to as “unanticipated ToO”, the observation is triggered by a direct request to the Project Scientist who may then

decide, in consultation with the TAC Chair, to dedicate some discretionary time to execute the request. In the new scheme proposed by the UG, an “unanticipated” ToO would be treated in a similar way as “pre-planned” one. The main difference concerns data-rights. In the current scheme, data from an “unanticipated” ToO are immediately public, whereas in the new scheme, the data would be the propriety of the PI for one year, as for any other normal proposal.

An XMM-Newton SAS training workshop was held at ESAC from June 19th to June 22nd. Ten out of the nineteen participants came from institutes without any expertise on SAS. Seven out of these ten scientists were planning to install SAS at their home institute.

The second XMM-Newton Serendipitous EPIC Source Catalogue, 2XMM, was released on the 24th of August. The catalogue has been constructed by the XMM- Newton Survey Science Centre (SSC) on behalf of ESA. 2XMM contains 247,000 X- ray source detections, which relate to 192,000 unique X-ray sources, making it the largest catalogue of astronomical X-ray sources produced ever. The net sky area coverage is ~360 deg2. On the 28th of August, a new version of the XMM-Newton Science Archive was released, which supports new source products associated with the 2XMM catalogue.

The seventh announcement of opportunity (AO7) was issued on August 28, as planned. The due date for proposals is the 5th of October 2007 (12:00 UT). All OTAC arrangements are running smoothly. The chairperson meeting is planned for the 29th and 30th of November 2007.

At the time of writing of this report (18th of September 2007), 1585 papers – either completely or partly based on XMM-Newton observations – have been published in the refereed literature, of which 240 are from 2007.

7.3 Integral: Christoph Winkler INTEGRAL continues to operate nominally. The 10th SPI annealing was performed successfully in June 2007.

The INTEGRAL (and XMM-Newton) Mission Extended Operations Review took place in May 2007 and the board concluded that (i) the scientific interest in both missions remains high; (ii) all mission elements are stable and trouble free with sufficient consumables and life-limited items to allow operating both missions up to at least 2018; (iii) national funding of the instruments and data centres will support operations until the end of future mission extensions, (iv) the review team fully endorsed the revised cost-saving operational concept proposed by the Executive.

The fifth Announcement of Opportunity for INTEGRAL open time observing proposals closed on 20 April 2007. The available observing time was oversubscribed by a factor 6. The total number of AO-5 proposals was 182, where this figure includes the 22 proposals received for the Key Programmes AO-5 issued a few months earlier. Peer review by the TAC took place in June and AO-5 observations started on August 16. Preparations to issue the Key Programme AO-6 (release: 22 October 2007) are underway.

The next meeting of the Integral Users Group (IUG) will take place in November. Following termination of the Core Programme at the end of AO5, the Integral Science Working Team has been disbanded and its members incorporated in the IUG meetings as non-voting experts. The new IUG chair is Prof Wim Hermsen (SRON Utrecht). Membership of the IUG (and TAC) has been updated following the usual rotation principle.

The total number of INTEGRAL related publications in refereed journals since launch is 293, with 54 published in 2007 so far. Five ESA press releases based on INTEGRAL scientific results appeared in 2007.

On the occasion of the 5th launch anniversary, a workshop entitled “INTEGRAL – the first five years” will take place in Sardinia on 17-19 October 2007 hosting more than 140 participants. The 7th INTEGRAL workshop, focussing on compact Galactic objects, is planned to take place in the period 08-11 September 2008 in Copenhagen.

7.4 Suzaku (ASTRO-E2): Arvind Parmar The Suzaku European AO3 opened on September 3, with a deadline of 30 November 2007 at 16:30 CET. As before, JAXA has kindly offered scientists from ESA member states 8 % of the observing time. European proposals are expected to include one or more Japanese co-investigators. More information can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/Suzaku . The 2007 Suzaku X-ray conference will take place in San Diego, California, from 10 to 12 December.

7.5 Akari (ASTRO-F): Alberto Salama AKARI exhausted its cryogen on 26 August 2007, reaching the pre-launch expectation of 550 days cryogenic lifetime. More than 94% of the sky has been covered twice by the All-sky survey. A total of 5000 pointed observations have been performed, of which 4000 in the non-survey phase of the mission. ESA astronomers obtained 400 pointings, i.e. exactly 10% as in the cooperation agreement. For comparison, the Japanese Open Time success rate is 17% (versus 20% in the agreement).

As planned, testing of the NIR IRC camera is underway, in view of its foreseen operation at non-cryogenic temperatures, in the so-called Phase 3. As requested by ISAS, support from the ESA Kiruna station continues until the planned end date of 31 October. Further to an orbit stabilisation manoeuvre foreseen for December and a check of the instrument performance, an AO will be released in early 2008.

ESAC continued to contribute to the testing of the instruments processing pipelines, and released updated Instrument Data User Manuals, in June and September 2007. A hands-on data reduction workshop was held at ESAC on 18 and 19 September, where 7 experts from Japan helped European scientists in reducing their data with AKARI processing toolkits. The workshop was organised in parallel sessions to maximise the return for each user.

The Pointing Reconstruction software underwent various upgrades to cope with format changes requested by ISAS and to estimate the resulting accuracies from statistical analysis. Version 3, released in June, includes a new smoother algorithm. Mass processing of the whole mission started at ESAC on the basis of data sets consistently pre-processed at ISAS. An IRC (mid IR) catalogue of identified detections from the whole mission, obtained as by-product of the Pointing Reconstruction software, was particularly appreciated by ISAS as an unsolicited input.

The PASJ AKARI special issue is planned for release on 12 October. It contains 19 refereed papers, also available on astro-ph.

Three ESA web stories were released over the reporting period, as usual in parallel to JAXA’s. The July story featured a 9-microns all-sky map together with images of star forming regions illustrating the superior spatial resolution of AKARI as compared to IRAS, its predecessor 20 years earlier. The August news reported AKARI observations of asteroid Itokawa, target of the JAXA asteroid explorer Hayabusa. The early September posting displayed FIS initial results on star formation in the outer arms of the nearby galaxy M101 (attributed to a merger) and about the South Ecliptic Pole cosmological deep survey (a further feedback on evolutionary models). These latest findings were presented at the Meeting of the Japanese Astronomical Society in September.

7.6 CoRoT: Malcolm Fridlund At time of writing, Corot has been 271 days in orbit and continues to operate flawlessly. The first long planetary observation will come to an end on October 15, at which point Corot will be re-pointed toward the galactic anti-centre. To date, CNES has distributed over 510 Gb of data, of which 500 Gb are science data and only 5 Gb contain housekeeping telemetry. Some teething problems continue to sporadically affect the ground station in Brazil and its back-up in Vienna, resulting in very limited loss of data. These problems are currently being addressed by CNES.

Corot is essentially photon noise limited over the whole magnitude range, from 11.5 to 16. The rate of appearance of new hot pixels has now stabilised. At this rate, at the end of the nominal 2.5 years mission, 11% of pixels will suffer from charges in excess of 300 e-, 2.2% from charges >1000e- and 0.015% from charges >10000e-. It is estimated that this should result in the loss of up to 3 % of astero-seismology data, well within the <5% specifications.

Three further new planets have been confirmed, 10 planetary candidates are being followed up and 6 new stellar binaries have been identified. A dozen of refereed articles are in preparation and until these are accepted, all results on exo-planets are embargoed. A press-conference is planned at Paris Observatory toward the end of October, following the completion of the first long look. CNES is also organising a Corot conference to be held in Paris in November 2008.

8. Projects under development

8.1 Herschel: Göran Pilbratt All three Herschel flight instruments have now been delivered. SPIRE was integrated onto the optical bench in the repaired flight cryostat in April 2007. The instrument level test (ILT) campaign of HIFI had to be extended, enabling an ILT extension also for PACS. Both consortia successfully employed the additional time granted; HIFI to characterise the instrument with the flight local oscillator (LO) system equipped with optical attenuators, and PACS to fully correct the spectrometer vignetting problem, map the photometer field of view, and to characterise the control loops of its mechanisms. Both instruments were delivered and integrated onto the optical bench in early July.

The physical mating of the Payload Module (PLM) with the Service Module (SVM) took place in the second week of September at Astrium, Friedrichshafen. This was followed by a high profile press event on September 19. The electrical integration is currently in progress. After closing, the cryostat will be pumped down, baked out, and then cooled down; this is the last planned cooldown of the Herschel cryostat and its instruments while on-ground!

When the cryostat is cool, a sequence of tests will commence among which the all important Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC) tests. The telescope is currently in storage at Astrium, Toulouse, while the sunshade and solar array are at ESTEC. These will eventually be integrated to the PLM and SVM, either at Astrium, Friedrichshafen, or at ESTEC, whichever is the most advantageous schedule wise. The transport to ESTEC of the complete spacecraft is currently scheduled in January 2008, after completion of the initial integrated system tests (IST1). In ESTEC, environmental testing and verification will take place, followed by IST2 and transportation to Kourou. The launch date remains 31 July 2008, though the Herschel programme currently needs to recover four weeks to meet this date.

During May-June, the Herschel Science Ground Segment (SGS) was subjected to an Implementation Review. The Review Board report was issued on July 27. It concluded that overall the Review was successful. Whilst the Board recognised that a few of the review objectives had not been met for some elements of the SGS, the Board was pleased to note that the overall status of the H-SGS was quite satisfactory. It made a total of 28 recommendations, 8 of which were labelled critical. All recommendations are currenly being addressed.

The time allocation resulting from the Guaranteed Time (GT) Key Programme (KP) Announcement of Opportunity (AO) was published in early July 2007, as planned. It was immediately followed by the release of the open time (OT) KP AO; the deadline for the community to respond is 25 October 2007. To assit the community in preparing their proposals, the Herschel Science Centre organised an Herschel observation planning workshop at ESAC on 20-21 September. Over 40 scientists participated. The Herschel Science Operations Manager has been appointed and took up duty on September 1.

8.2 Planck: Jan Tauber

State of integration of the Planck satellite in early September 2007 in the clean room of Thales Alenia Space (France), ESA’s prime contractor for Herschel and Planck.

The integration of the Planck satellite is now in a very advanced stage (see picture). The alignment of the telescope has been completed. Development and validation of the on-board application software remains on the critical path. Once fully assembled, the satellite will embark on a long series of environmental tests culminating in early 2008 with an end-to-end performance validation in simulated flight conditions in a specially-built chamber at the Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL).

The only remaining instrument flight item which has not yet been delivered is the HFI 4 K cooler. Several anomalies were found which required urgent repair work. This has now been implemented and the cooler is currently under test at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. A spare unit has been integrated onto the satellite so as to allow environmental testing to proceed. The cooler flight unit will be swapped for the spare before the satellite is shipped to CSL for end-to-end testing.

The last element of the Radio Frequency Qualification Model measurement campaign has been completed successfully in September, with the validation of the technique that will be used for the ambient alignment check with a reference horn.

Following the November 2006-March 2007 Implementation Review of the Planck Science Ground Segment, a delta-review took place toward the end of May, concentrating on the status of the HFI Data Processing Centre and some of the common LFI-HFI infrastructures. No show-stoppers were identified, but many

detailed recommendations were issued which are being followed up. One of these recommendations was the establishment of a Science Ground Segment Steering Committee, which in the meantime has been formed and met twice.

The first phase of system-level end-to-end testing of the scientific data-processing pipelines for both LFI and HFI was completed at the end of September. The second and more ambitious second phase, with more realistic simulated data, is scheduled for completion by March 2008, in time for the Flight Acceptance Review. As mentioned above, the launch date for Planck (and Herschel) remains 31 July 2008.

As mandated by the Science Management Plan, the Core Programme of scientific exploitation activities that will be carried out by the PI Consortia during the proprietary period (equivalent to “guaranteed-time activities”) must be established before launch. This includes also supporting observations with other ground or space facilities and in particular the preparation of Herschel Open Time Key Programmes by common Planck-Herschel teams. The process started on March 23 with the issue of a Call for Proposals internal to the Planck collaboration. More than 50 proposals were submitted in May by members of the Planck community, and were reviewed at a Joint Consortium meeting which took place in Toulouse in late July, attended by more than 200 people. Detailed recommendations are being issued by the Planck Science Team. It is planned that the programme and associated plan of activities will be established by early 2008.

8.3 JWST: Peter Jakobsen The ESA/NASA Memorandum of Understanding on JWST was signed by the NASA Administrator and ESA Director General during a ceremony held on 18 June at the Le Bourget Air Show.

The latest “Reformulation” of the NASA JWST Project has been completed. The modified plan maintains launch readiness in 2013 and has resulted in a streamlining of the observatory assembly and test programme by eliminating the dependency between the engineering model and flight hardware in the test flow. Seventeen of the 18 JWST beryllium Primary Mirrors segments are now at Tinsley in California undergoing various stages of grinding and polishing. Two spare primary mirror segments and the secondary mirror spare are being machined at Axsys in Alabama.

Progress on NIRSpec remains steady. A NIRSpec Intermediate System Review was successfully held on 4-6 July at Astrium, Ottobrunn. The review uncovered a number of issues, but none are considered show-stoppers. The recent modifications made to the NIRSpec filter and grating wheels manufactured by Zeiss has delayed the delivery of these subsystems, which are now on the project critical path. There is also some concern that the operation of the wheels will lead to significant disturbances of the JWST observatory pointing. It is likely that further modifications to the two ISO- derived ratchet mechanisms will be necessary in order to eliminate this problem. The Structural Thermal Model of the NIRSpec Foreoptical system was successfully integrated and vibrated by Astrium. The Qualification Model is currently undergoing alignment at Sagem. The preliminary wavefront error measurements are very encouraging.

The MIRI verification model

On the NASA side, significant progress has been made with the 5 µm substrate- removed NIRSpec detector arrays. A NASA-appointed Tiger Team critically reviewed the manufacturing process and made a number of recommendations that have enabled the manufacturer Teledyne to recover the low dark current levels demonstrated in earlier tests. Production of the first flight candidate NIRSpec arrays is expected to commence soon. The first flight candidate NIRSpec Microshutter Array chips are now emerging from the production line. Initial direct measurements of the microshutter closed-to-open optical contrast measurements have yielded very encouraging results, with contrast ratios about six times better than the minimum requirement.

Progress on MIRI also remains steady. The Verification Model of the Optical Bench Assembly is currently undergoing final assembly. Optical testing is expected to start in early November and last through the spring of 2008. On the US side, NASA has completed and delivered the engineering model of the MIRI detector system. The Raytheon flight detector arrays have been manufactured. Two of the three MIRI flight candidate arrays have so far been selected.

8.4 GAIA: Timo Prusti Gaia passed the preliminary design review (PDR) successfully at the end of June. The PDR board identified several critical items, for which a status report must be provided by the end of the year. Among these, the most important from a scientific standpoint are the effect of particle radiation on CCD performance, the stability of the basic

angle (BA) between the two mirrors and the radial velocity spectrometer (RVS). The testing of irradiated CCDs is proceeding according to plan and the parameter space for charge-injection (CI) strategies has been explored. While CI appears to be beneficial for bright stars, its effect on faint stars is yet to be demonstrated. Tests at different temperatures have confirmed the need for the CCD to be operated at or below 170K. Stability of the BA is a mission critical item. Current efforts concentrate on achieving the best possible passive stability and to use the BA monitoring device to measure the remaining long term BA variations for post-facto correction. After the PDR, the RVS design has been further optimised such that its performances are now fully compliant with the specifications.

The previous Gaia Science Team (GST) had its last meeting on September 21. The main topic was to review the status of the PDR work plans and action items. The remaining open issues flagged by the PDR will require continued scientific support. This support will be provided by the project scientist (PS) and his team, but in some cases additional expert advice is required. It was decided to form a payload expert group so as to provide support on request to the Gaia Project. The new GST took-up duty on October 1.

Upon recommendation from the AWG, the SPC at its May meeting unanimously approved the selection of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), subject to the adoption of the Multi-Lateral Agreement (MLA) between ESA and the DPAC Lead Funding Agencies (LFA). Over the summer, the MLA – and its accompanying Joint Project Implementation Plan (JPIP) – have been iterated between DPAC, ESA and the LFA. The MLA is close to finalisation and on track for a positive recommendation by the SPC in November and subsequent approval by the ESA Council in December.

* * *