XMM-Newton-NEWS


XMM-Newton-NEWS  #42,    19-Oct-2004

ESA, XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre at
European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC)
P.O. Box - Apdo. 50727, 28080 Madrid, Spain

SOC Home Page: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/
Helpdesk web interface: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/xmm-newton-helpdesk
Helpdesk email address: xmmhelp@sciops.esa.int
News Mailing List: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/newsletter

Contents:


XMM-Newton AO-4

The XMM-Newton fourth Announcement of Opportunity (AO-4) closed on the 8th of October 2004.

The performance of the Remote Proposal Submission System was excellent. Reports of non-nominal behaviour were extremely rare.

In total, 657 valid proposals were submitted requesting, in total, 101747 ksec of science time. Compared to the previous announcement (AO-3) the total science time requested has increased by about 3%. The mean time requested for an individual observation is 38 ksec, which is an increase of about 10% in comparison to the previous call. This trend was already noticeable comparing previous AOs.

The fourth Announcement of Opportunity covers a period of one year with 14500 ksec observing time available for distribution. The over-subscription factor is 7.0.

In total 30 proposals for "Large Programs" were submitted. Triggered observations are requested in 18 proposals. For the joint XMM-Newton Chandra program the SOC received 10 proposals and for the joint XMM-Newton ESO (VLT and VLTI) program 4 proposals are competing.

SOC received proposals from 484 different principal investigators from 23 countries, mostly ESA member states, the United States and Japan. The number of countries involved increases to 35 if co-investigators are taken into account as well. Considering principal investigators and co-investigators, about 1600 individual scientists were involved in the response to the fourth Announcement of Opportunity.

New e-mail addresses for XMM-Newton SOC members

Due to a change of mail server, all people from the XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre have received new e-mail identities.

The new corporate Science Operations e-mail addresses are defined as
    FirstName.LastName@sciops.esa.int

Although the old XMM-Newton SOC addresses will remain valid for some time to avoid interruption in the e-mail service and to ensure a smooth transition, you might already now want to update such entries in your e-mail address book.

E-mail addresses of the helpdesk (xmmhelp@sciops.esa.int) and the Principal Investigator (PI) dedicated account () are NOT affected.


Yours sincerely,
XMM-Newton SOC