XMM-Newton-NEWS


XMM-Newton-NEWS  #53,    19-Dec-2005

XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre at
ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre,
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:


EPIC Background Working Group Web Page

A web page describing the status of the ongoing work of the XMM-Newton EPIC Background Working Group is accessible from the SOC Home Page under 'Software & Calibration' -> 'Background Analysis'.

The XMM-Newton EPIC Background working group has been founded as a steering and supervising committee to provide the user with clear information about the EPIC background and about (SAS)-tools to treat it correctly in a range of scenarios.

For the moment, the web page describes the different components of the EPIC background, provides links to external sources of information (papers discussing the EPIC background including collections of blank sky fields), and provides a link to the presentations given at previous working group meetings.

Patch to SAS 6.5.0

A small patch to SAS 6.5.0 has been released and should be installed after the SAS 6.5.0 installation is done. This patch is needed because of an incompatibility between earlier versions of the SAS (e.g. SAS 6.1) and some EPIC calibration files (CCFs) released with SAS 6.5. Those CCFs took into account the spatial and temporal dependency of the EPIC-MOS redistribution function, and if used together with earlier SAS versions, could produce the wrong redistribution function without giving any warning message. Therefore a SAS patch and updated CCFs (which will reject usage in combination with earlier SAS versions) have been made available.

Release note, download and installation information for the patch are available at:
   http://xmm.esac.esa.int/sas/new/patch/

Workshop Announcement

High Resolution X-ray Spectroscopy: Towards XEUS and CON-X

A two day meeting will be held on the 27th and 28th of March 2006 at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, Holmbury St. Mary, Dorking, Surrey, UK.

The meeting will be dedicated to review recent results from high resolution X-ray spectroscopy with XMM-Newton and Chandra, and to consider how we can build on them, by taking advantage of future opportunities such as XEUS and Con-X.

For more details, visit the workshop website:
   http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~gbr/workshop2/


Yours sincerely,
XMM-Newton SOC