Thursday, 03 July 2025, 13:00-18:00 MESZ

Fraport Conference Center, Frankfurt Airport, Germany

The ESA Director of Science invited the scientific community to join her expert teams for a knowledge transfer workshop for ESA’s INTEGRAL Gamma Ray Mission. 

After 22 years of operation and outstanding science delivery, INTEGRAL entered its post-operations phase on 28 February 2025. The space craft will be de-orbited in 2029 and, until then, will be safely monitored by ESA Mission Operations teams. 

In recognition of INTEGRAL’s importance in the Interplanetary Network and as a detection device for high-energy transients, ESA offers the scientific community an opportunity to access basic data in the coming years and, in the spirit of open science, offered this knowledge transfer workshop led by mission experts. 

Specifically, this ESA-organized workshop aimed a) to inform the scientific community about the type of INTEGRAL data that ESA can still provide, highlighting the limitations and changes since the end of science operations, and b) to facilitate the community coordination around the INTEGRAL SPI-ACS burst event information service.

The purpose of the workshop was also to make it clear that the community will need to self-organise to take care of the data that will be transmitted without expecting or relying on ESA for anything other than providing the telemetry.

The presentations given during the workshop, the recording of the meeting and a repository of the documentation mentioned in the MOC presentations on Data Distribution and Fligh-Dynamics products are provided on the Legacy Workshop webpage [here].

Key Details:

• Agenda: The workshop focussed on ESA’s responsibilities, specifically:

  • Details of data and data structures still generated by the INTEGRAL spacecraft;

  • Boundary conditions for the availability of these data structures (e.g., reduced ground station pass frequency, lack of instrument calibration/maintenance, no data quality assurance, etc.);

  • Information on the interface point offered by ESOC for data access;

  • Details of auxiliary files produced by ESOC, necessary for data processing.

• Workshop Organization: The technical material was provided by Marcus Kirsch’s team (Head of the XMM-Newton & INTEGRAL Mission Operations Unit at ESOC). The workshop was organised by Matthias Ehle (INTEGRAL Mission Manager) & Guillaume Belanger (ISOC Coordinator and INTEGRAL Archive Scientist) and lasted half a day, from 13:00 - 18:00 MESZ. The material itself was non-interactive, as the data structures are basic and ESA does not conduct more advanced processing.

• Attendance: In-person attendance was encouraged. The workshop was offered in a hybrid format for those unable to travel. The workshop venue was the Fraport Conference Center inside Frankfurt Airport, Germany. Directions to reach the venue were given [here]. Information about joining the meeting online via WebEx was communicated to registered participants in due time.

• Collaboration with ISDC: We have been in communication with Carlo Ferrigno, Head of the Swiss-funded INTEGRAL Science Data Centre (ISDC), who confirmed that the Real-Time Processing Pipeline could continue to process SPI-ACS data. ISDC no longer provides burst alerts (the IBAS alert system stopped working in March 2025), but they provided a service to retrieve the SPI-ACS data through their MultiMessenger Online Data Analysis  (MMODA) interface. 

  ISDC is currently exploring the level of support that they will be able to provide in the context of their funding timeline until spacecraft reentry in early 2029. A status update on the ISDC plans was provided during the Workshop.

  If ISDC confirms their availability to provide the SPI-ACS service to the community, the only technical step required to resume the service is reopening the data transfer interface between ESOC and ISDC.