XMM-Newton Status Report - November 2007
Operations and Archiving
Despite the fact that XMM-Newton will not reach its 10-year design lifetime until the end of 2009 a similar independent review of operations as for INTEGRAL was performed. The MEOR found that the spacecraft, instruments and ground segment are in excellent health and the projected life-limited items and consumables lifetimes are sufficient to support operations to well beyond the requested extension.
The MEOR also fully endorsed the combined operations concept including moving the real time instrument monitoring from ESAC to automation running at ESOC. This is currently under test with ESAC in "listening" mode and responsibility for monitoring the instrument radiation levels with a newly developed software package under the supervision of the ESOC spacecraft controllers.
A major XMM-Newton Science Archive release took place end of August with reprocessed data and the release of 2XMM catalogue.