The Calibration Legacy of the ISO Mission
                
           Conference to be held in the week 5-9 February 2001 
			    
                                at the
                            
                            ISO Data Centre
                              
                        Villafranca del Castillo
                           
                             Madrid, Spain
                          
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This is the first announcement of a conference which will be held at the
Data Centre of the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) in Villafranca del
Castillo near Madrid (Spain) in the week of February 5 to 9, 2001.

The programme of the conference will reflect the wide range of
astronomical and instrumental calibration issues which have been
tackled during the history of the ISO project to-date. Topics range
through :

  . the establishment of major databases of reference astronomical 
    calibration sources;
  . lessons learned relevant to the design of future instruments;
  . actual techniques developed, and problems encountered, in the
    ground-based and in-flight calibration of the ISO instruments.

Particular emphasis will be placed upon the relevance of the ISO
experience to calibration of future space missions.  Contributions
addressing the relevance for calibration of ground-based systems are
also welcome.

The ISO project, including the approximately 2.5 years of in-orbit
operation of the ISO spacecraft, has spanned two decades to-date.
Hundreds of work-years have been invested in the attendant calibration
programmes.  Pre-launch preparatory calibration programmes have
generated large databases of calibrated stellar spectra, spanning the
visible to > 240 micron wavelength range.  Asteroid and planetary
spectral models have been generated and refined.  Extensive laboratory
calibration work has been performed on detector and optical sub-systems
and on the instruments. The complex suite of ISO instruments has been
calibrated in-flight.

The ISO instruments ranged from broadband photometers, array cameras and
photo-polarimeters, through moderate resolution grating and CVF
spectrometers to high-resolution Fabry-Perot systems.  The operating
wavelength range ran from 2.5 to 240 microns.

The ISO project clearly represents a major repository of calibration
experience.  It is an important producer of reference-source databases.
This legacy should be exploited in planning the calibration of future
systems, and in their design and development.

This conference will take place shortly after the ISO Calibration
Working Groups have completed their synthesis of the results of ISO
instrument calibration work.  The explanatory documentation of the
Observatory will be close to its final content, and the time will be
ripe to pass on the legacy of the ISO calibration experience to the
future.

The meeting will be appropriate for astronomers and engineers wishing to
record, in the proceedings of this Legacy meeting, the insights gained
from their work on ISO or on other astronomical systems.  It will be
particularly relevant to those faced with the task of calibrating
complex IR astronomical systems in the coming years.

It is intended that the proceedings of this conference be published as
an ESA-SP publication, and that they should gather in one place the
legacy of the ISO calibration work, with emphasis on clear and thorough
exposition of the experience gained and of the lessons learned.

If you are interested in the conference, but have received this email
only indirectly, and would like to be sure to receive future mailings,
then please notify :==> helpdesk@iso.vilspa.esa.es 

If you have received this mailing directly, you will automatically
receive the next announcement.

We will send out a second announcement with more information in July,
and a third announcement in September, which will include detailed
information on logistics, a tentative conference agenda, and a list of
invited speakers. 

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Local Organisation :

L. Metcalfe (Chair), 
M.F. Kessler (Project Scientist), 
A. Salama, 
P. Garcia-Lario.


   ISO Data Centre,
   Villafranca del Castillo Satellite Tracking Station
   Apartado 50727, 28080 Madrid (Spain)
   email: helpdesk@iso.vilspa.esa.es

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