INTEGRAL Status Report - January 2009
Operations and Archiving
In addition to routine science operations, another battery reconditioning and the 12th SPI annealing were successfully executed in September 2008. The spectrometer’s energy resolution has recovered as expected. Interestingly, one of the 17 detectors which was previously noisy, and therefore operated at a lower high voltage (HV), has recovered and is now operated nominally. The next annealing is planned for spring 2009, while another battery reconditioning should not be needed before 2010.
The on-board consumables have sufficient margin to provide nominal mission operations beyond the current budgeted and approved extension (i.e. beyond 31 Dec 2012).
INTEGRAL is now deep in the AO-6 observations programme based on 192 proposals that were received in response to AO-6 with an oversubscription in time by a factor of 5.6. These included 13 Key Programme proposals, 61 standard proposals and 118 subscriptions to targets in the Key Programme fields.
Science Highlights
There were more than 140 participants to the 7th INTEGRAL workshop held in Copenhagen. The workshop focussed on INTEGRAL studies of compact objects.
INTEGRAL has discovered a high level of polarisation in the non-pulsed soft gamma-ray emission from the Crab pulsar. The observations have revealed that these gamma-rays must originate very close to the neutron star posing a puzzle for theorists.
Over 380 refereed papers directly based on INTEGRAL results have been published.
Legal disclaimer
This report is based on the October 2008 SPC submission and the December 2008 Council submission. Please see the copyright section of the legal disclaimer (bottom of this page) for terms of use.