INTEGRAL Latest News

INTEGRAL AO-8 General Programme approved

25 June 2010 The INTEGRAL AO-8 General Programme, as recommended by the Time Allocation Committee (TAC) and approved on the 15th of June by the ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration (Prof. David Southwood), has been released and the observers have been informed.

Integral SPI detector failure

7 June 2010 An anomaly on SPI Ge Detector #1 occurred on May 27. The failure occurred 31 hours after radiation belt exit (at an altitude of 158000km) and approximately 6 weeks after the end of the last annealing. The MOC and SPI teams are still investigating the anomaly, but the chance of any recovery is slight.

Four Germanium detectors out of nineteen have failed, resulting in a decrease of the scientific performance by 12% with respect to the full detector configuration. Detector #2 failed on 06/12/2003; detector #17 on 17/07/2004; detector #5 on 19/02/2009 and detector #1 on 27/05/2010.

8th Announcement of Opportunity (AO-8): preliminary statistics

29 April 2010 The deadline for the submission of proposals for AO-8 open time observations was on 23 April 2010, and all proposals are in the ISOC database. Below are some preliminary statistics on the proposals that have been received.

Total number of proposals

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.

The Time Allocation Committee, will peer review early June all proposals and recommend a scientific observing programme to ESA. Following this meeting, ESA will announce the approved observing program for the AO-8 cycle of observations.

A second Call within this AO-8 will be released on 30 August, 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 08 October 2010.

Christoph Winkler

INTEGRAL Project Scientist

29 April 2010

2010 Zeldovich Medal for Vito Sguera

28 April 2010 On 01 April 2010, the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) has decided to present the 2010 Zeldovich Medal for COSPAR Scientific Commission E (Research in Astrophysics from Space) to Dr. Vito Sguera (Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale & Fisica Cosmica, Bologna, Italy). The Zeldovich Medal is given to young scientists who have demonstrated excellence and achievement in their field of research.
Zeldovich medals are conferred by COSPAR and the Russian Academy of Sciences and honor the memory of the distinguished astrophysicist Academician Yakov B. Zeldovich.

The presentation of the award will take place at the inaugural ceremony of the 38th COSPAR scientific assembly in Bremen (19 July 2010).

Since its launch in 2002, the INTEGRAL observatory has played a key role in discovering many new high mass X-ray binaries thanks to its large field of view, continuous monitoring of the galactic plane and good sensitivity. The majority of these systems turned out to be persistent supergiant high mass X-ray binaries that escaped previous detection because of their very obscured nature. The remaining ones, named supergiant fast X-ray transients (SFXTs), were missed before because of the very low level of quiescent X-ray luminosities (~10³² -10³³ erg s^-1), occasionally interrupted by fast X-ray flares lasting typically less than a day and reaching peak luminosities of ~10³⁶ erg s^-1. This peculiar transient behaviour has never been seen before from classical persistent SGXBs, which are characterised by X-ray luminosities in the range 10³⁶-10³⁸ erg s^-1 with a few of them rarely displaying flaring activity on a timescale of a few hours. The work by Dr Vito Sguera is contributing significantly to our knowledge on the supergiant fast X-ray transients.
Congratulations from the INTEGRAL team at ESA.

27 April 2010
Chris Winkler

 

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