Mar Sierra

ESA ISO/XMM

Since I came to ESAC 4 years ago, I have been switching from XMM to
ISO. I was granted a two years Fellowship within a program
from the "Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologa", similar to the ESA
YGT program. During my first year I was a member of the RGS
Instrument Dedicated Team and worked on the calibration and
monitoring of the RGS. My second year was spent at ISO, working in
the testing and description of requirements of the AVO
(Astrophysical Virtual Observatory) during the preparation of its
First Science Demo 2004. I also worked in the improvement of the
ISO archive (ingestion of new reprocessed data, new ISO catalogues
and atlases, tracking of refereed ISO publications). I continued on
ISO and I was involved actively in the preparation of one Science
Case for the AVO Demo2005 that took place here, at ESAC. We
identified new candidate Post-AGB stars and Planetary Nebulae
combining infrared photometric data from MSX and IRAS Point Source
Catalogues. PNe show characteristic infrared colours which make
them easily distinguishable from other types of sources. Based on
their characteristic location in infrared MSX/IRAS colour-colour
diagrams, we discovered 103 sources that have 90% probability of
being transition sources in the phase preceding the PNe stage. We
also used the AVO tools, in particular VOSpec, to generete the SEDs
of the sources to classify them.

I went back to XMM, to the Users Support Group to work as mission
planner for nearly 8 months.

I am currently working on the project of the generation of a
photometric catalogue. The information is taken from the CPSL files
which contain all the sources extracted from all ISOCAM images.

I do not have any specific area of research but have been involved
in different projects and subjects, from hydrodynamical simulations
of galaxy formation, to any multiwavelength research that could be
done taking the advantage of the AVO.