ISO in Post Operations

Last update: 27 September 2004

During its routine operational phase, which lasted from February 1996 to April 1998 when the on-board supply of liquid helium coolant was exhausted, ISO made around 30000 individual observations of all classes of astronomical objects at wavelengths from 2-240 µm with imaging, photometry and spectroscopy at a variety of spatial and spectral resolutions. In the course of the next year, all these data will enter the public domain. Activities to support the world-wide astronomical community in exploiting these data are already underway. This 'post operations' or data exploitation phase is a collaborative effort between 7 centres that were deeply involved in the development and in-orbit use of ISO. The effort is funded through to the end of 2001.

This web page gives a brief outline of:

the objectives of this phase,
the services to be provided to the community,
the centres involved and their responsibilities,
some main milestones.

Objectives:

The goal of the post operations phase is to maximise the scientific return of ISO by facilitating effective and widespread exploitation of data. This will be accomplished by:

deepening the understanding of the performance of the instruments and the satellite in orbit,
improving the data processing, both pipeline products and interactive analysis software,
supporting the general astronomical community to use ISO data,
providing a homogeneous archive: the interim archive in autumn 1998 and the final archive in mid-late 2001.

At end of the post-operations phase (end 2001), it is intended to make available a final archive of data, software and documentation, which will support continued exploitation of the ISO legacy by the astronomical community for at least the following 10 years.

Services:

The following main services will be provided to users:

Direct support:
- help with reduction and analysis of data either via visits to Data Centres or remotely, e.g. by e-mail. Note that it is not always straightforward to use ISO data; thus, detailed consultation with a data centre, preferably also a visit, is strongly advised.

Distribution of:
- data analysis tools: e.g. the interactive analysis packages for the instruments, the ISO Spectral Analysis Package (ISAP),
- documentation: a 'library' of explanatory documents to help users get the best out of the data is also accessible via the web. Additional documentation includes technical notes, WWW pages, newsletters, etc. The 6 volume ISO Handbook provides a stand-alone definitive guide to ISO and its data products.

Access to data:

a web-based interface to the archive, providing flexible and friendly query facilities, is available as from December 1998. Note that Java version 1.1 or higher is required to use this interface. Development and upgrade of the user interface will continue during the following years.

'Browse' Products: To give users a quick but accurate indication of whether a particular observation is useful for their science a set of so-called 'browse' products has been produced for the archive. These consist of icons, postcards and survey products.

depending on volume, the requested data will be provided either via ftp or on CD-ROM.

on-the-fly reprocessing: Two versions of the homogeneous archive are planned in autumn 1998 and 2001, respectively. For each of these the entire ISO data set will be reprocessed uniformly. However, it is also planned to have one main upgrade per year to the processing software and calibration files of each instrument. So that users can take advantage of the improved processing, a capability to request the archive to re-process data `on-the-fly' was introduced in May 1999.

Data Centres:

The seven centres involved in this effort, and their respective responsibilities, are:

ISO Data Centre at ESA, VILSPA in Spain,
Five Specialist National Data Centres (NDC):

SAp/Saclay

IAS/Orsay

ISOPHOT Data Centre at MPIA in Germany

Dutch ISO Data Analysis Centre

ISO Spectrometer Data Centre

UK ISO Data Centre

each National Data Centre is responsible for detailed instrument-specific software and expertise, including provision of software modules for the pipeline, and for supporting their local and national user communities.

ISO Support Center at IPAC in the United States.

responsible for support to US community plus provision of some data processing tools.

All of these centres provide direct support to users and welcome visitors.

Martin Kessler,
ISO Project Scientist.

Main Milestones:

Aug 1998: Formal start of post operations phase.
Aug 1998: All data centres open to receive visitors and give support
Dec 1998: Archive opens on the WWW.

May 1999: Release of ISOCAM pipeline upgrade (OLP 8.0)
Jul 1999: Release of archive version 2.0, with improved facilities for expert users
Aug 1999: All ISO data in public domain
Sep 1999: Release of ISOPHOT and SWS pipeline upgrade (OLP 8.4)
Dec 1999: Release of LWS pipeline upgrade (OLP 8.7)
Dec 1999: Release of archive version 3.0, with improved links to other archives

Jul 2000: Release of ISOCAM and ISOPHOT pipeline upgrade (OLP 9.0)
Nov 2000: Release of SWS and ISOCAM pipeline upgrade (OLP 9.5)

Mar 2001: Release of final pipeline upgrade for all instruments (OLP 10)
Nov 2001: Release of final ISO Handbook 
Autumn 2001: Legacy (final) archive available to community
Dec 2001: End of post-operations phase.