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INTEGRAL Latest News Solar flare 17+18 May
18 May 2012 INTEGRAL was affected by a moderate solar flare, but accompanied by strong proton radiation, starting on 01:49Z on 17 May 2012 in revolution 1171. Soon after, JEM-X, OMC and IBIS deactivated autonomously due to the high radiation and remained inactive for 31.2, 30.8 and 5.4 hours, respectively. The SPI ACS high voltage had to be switched off for an hour, otherwise the instrument continued working normally. Nominal operations of all four instruments were resumed at 13:54Z on 18 May.
Earth Observations
8 May 2012 INTEGRAL will conduct a new series of public Earth/Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB) observations in revolution 1168 (starting on May, 9th). This implies that, for those revolutions (1168, 1169, then 1197 and 1206 in August, 1216 in September and 1234 in November), the possibility to react to a ToO will be severely limited. Earth observations will also be done in AO11. This is a public programme where the Earth will drift through the field of view of the INTEGRAL instruments (see animation here). Results from this observation will help in separating the cosmic and instrumental backgrounds, and so ultimately lead to improved background subtraction. Scientifically, the main goals are to measure the spectral shape of the CXB emission above 20 keV and to study any high-energy emission from the Earth during storms in auroral regions.
10th Announcement of Opportunity (AO-10): preliminary statistics 25 April 2012 The deadline for the submission of proposals for AO-10 open time observations was on 20 April 2012, and all proposals are in the ISOC database. Below are some preliminary statistics on the proposals that have been received.
Total number of proposals
The total number of proposals received is 59. The total observing time requested is about 65 Msec (for all types of observation, i.e. fixed time, normal time, and ToO). Here, 10% of the requested total ToO time has been taken into account. Given that up to about 20 Msec of observing time (for new observing proposals) will be available for the AO-10 observing programme (12 months duration starting on 1 January 2013), this corresponds to an oversubscription in time by a factor of 3.3. This is again a high value, showing the continued high interest of the scientific community in the INTEGRAL mission.
Proposals per category
In the following table we give the breakdown of number of proposals as a function of the proposal category. Note that the numbers on requested observing times do include ToO proposals, but it has been assumed here, that a typical ToO proposal requests about 10% of its total observing time as entered into PGT from all the candidate sources included in a ToO proposal. Scientific Category
| Number of proposals | Requested observing time (Ms),
includes ToO times x 10%
| Galactic Astronomy
| 38
| 32.2
| Extragalactic Astronomy
| 14 | 19.4 | Nucleosynthesis and diffuse
continnum/line emission
| 7
| 13.6 | Total
| 59 | 65.2 | The Time Allocation Committee, will peer review early June all proposals and will recommend the AO-10 observing programme to ESA.
A second Call within this AO-10 will be released on 3 September, inviting proposals on individual point sources or selected sky areas (for diffuse emission studies) to be associated as "data-right proposals" with the selected observations, excluding ToO observations. The deadline for submission of data rights proposal will be 28 September 2012.
Christoph Winkler
INTEGRAL Project Scientist
25 April 2012
ToO observations of MAXI J1305-704
18 April 2012 Tomorrow, April 19, INTEGRAL will perform a Target of Opportunity observation on the recently discovered X-ray transient MAXI J1305-704 ( ATel #4024), in order to identify the nature of the source. Please consult the scheduling pages for more information. Multi-wavelength Campaign on the Galactic Centre's Supermassive Black Hole
15 March 2012 On 15-22 March 2012 INTEGRAL will participate in a large-scale multi-wavelength campaign on the Galactic center with major international astronomical facilities. The Galactic Center is known to have flaring phases caused by material falling onto the black hole. The aim of this campaign is to measure the behavior of the emission near the black hole during these flares by performing observations simultaneous with VLBA in the radio, the European Southern Observatory's VLT in the optical, and ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra satellites in the X-rays. INTEGRAL will supplement the campaign with data in the soft gamma-rays, in order to study the emission of the most energetic photons expected to come from such events.
INTEGRAL AO-10 Call for Observing Proposals is open! 12 March 2012 Today, the Director of Science and Robotic Exploration (Prof. Alvaro Giménez) has released the 10th Announcement of Opportunity for observing proposals with INTEGRAL. This announcement solicits proposals for observations to be carried out from January 2013 for a period of 12 months. Proposers from all over the world are welcome to participate. All proposals will be subject to an independent peer review by the INTEGRAL Time Allocation Committee (TAC). The deadline for Proposals submission is Friday 20 April 2012, 14:00 CEST. Observing proposals selected for AO-10 will subsequently be open for so-called "data right proposals" via a second Call for Proposals. These associated proposals allow the possibility to obtain data rights on point-like, extended sources or emission features contained in the field of view of accepted observing proposals.
More information can be found on the AO-10 page.
A X5 class Solar flare affected the INTEGRAL instruments again 07 March 2012 Following the latest Solar flare, this morning near 00:28, IBIS, JEM-X1/2 and OMC went all into safe mode from about 04:00, after the coronal mass ejected entered the Earth's environment. So far, SPI remains operational. Update: After 09:00 (UT) SPI started to be affected as well, and the instrument has been put in safe mode as well around 12:00 (UT). Since the radiation level is still increasing, it is unlikely that the instruments return to nominal operations during the current revolution, 1147. Update: At the start of revolution 1148 radiation levels were still very high, instrument operations will only be resumed when the background has reduced to a safe level. Update: Activation of the main instruments was completed during revolution 1149 on 12 March at 11:11 for SPI and 14:07 for IBIS. Final Update: Activation of the two monitors was completed about 6 hours later, at 19:42 for OMC and 20:36 for JEM-X. The IREM counts are now only slightly higher than their nominal values.
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