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Walter, R., Aubord, A., Bartholdi, P., Beck, M., Beckmann, V., Binko, P., Borkowski, J., Chernyakova, M., Contessi, T., Courvoisier, T. J.-L., Dubath, P., Ebisawa, K., Favre, P., Gaber, M., Götz, D., Jaffe, T., Jennings, D., Kretschmar, P., Landriu, D., Lecoeur, I., Lerusse, L., Lock, T., Meharga, M., Mereghetti, S., Morisset, N., Mowlavi, N., Paltani, S., Peachey, J., Pottschmidt, K., O'Neel, B., Produit, N., Rohlfs, R., Sauvageon, A., Shaw, S., Türler, M., Diehl, R., Domingo, A., Goldwurm, A., Hansson, L., Schmidt, M., Westergaard, N.-J., & Winkler, C. 2003, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 314 Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIII, eds. F. Ochsenbein, M. Allen, & D. Egret (San Francisco: ASP), 432

The INTEGRAL Ground Segment

R. Walter, A. Aubord, P. Bartholdi, M. Beck, V. Beckmann, P. Binko, J. Borkowski, M. Chernyakova, T. Contessi, T. Courvoisier, P. Dubath, K. Ebisawa, P. Favre, M. Gaber, D. Götz, T. Jaffe, D. Jennings, P. Kretschmar, D. Landriu, I. Lecoeur, L. Lerusse,T. Lock, M. Meharga, S. Mereghetti, N. Morisset, N. Mowlavi, S. Paltani, J. Peachey, K. Pottschmidt, B. O'Neel, N. Produit, R. Rohlfs, A. Sauvageon, S. Shaw, M. Türler
INTEGRAL Science Data Center, Chemin d'Ecogia 16, CH-1291 Versoix, Switzerland, http://isdc.unige.ch/

R. Diehltex2html_wrap_inline$^1$, A. Domingotex2html_wrap_inline$^2$, A. Goldwurmtex2html_wrap_inline$^3$, L. Hanssontex2html_wrap_inline$^4$, M. Schmidttex2html_wrap_inline$^5$, N.-J. Westergaardtex2html_wrap_inline$^6$, C. Winklertex2html_wrap_inline$^4$
$^1$Max Planck Inst. für extraterr. Physik, Postfach 1312, D-85741 Garching bei München, Germany; $^2$Laboratorio de Astrofìsica Espacial y Física Fundamental, POB 50727, E-28080 Madrid, Spain; $^3$Service d'Astrophysique, Centre d'Etude de Saclay, F-911190 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France; $^4$European Space Technology Center, P.O. Box 299, NL-2200 AG Nordwijk, The Netherland; $^5$European Space Operation Center, Robert Bosch Str. 5, D-64293 Darmstadt, Germany; $^6$Danish Space Research Institute, Juliane Maries Vej 30, DK-2100 Copenhagen

Abstract:

The INTernational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory ( INTEGRAL), an observatory mission of the European Space Agency, was launched on October 17, 2002. Since then, nominal operations have been conducted successfully and scientific alerts and products are made available to the science community with a short delay. Here we briefly describe the 3 centres responsible for the INTEGRAL operations, with emphasis on the system built at the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre and conclude on the performance of the ground segment.

1. Introduction

INTEGRAL was successfully launched by a PROTON rocket from Baikonour on October 17, 2002. During the Launch & Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) the final orbit of 72 hours was reached and most of the spacecraft platform functions were commissioned. The scientific payload was then switched on, commissioned, tuned, and partially calibrated within the allocated time so that routine science operations could start, as planned, in the last days of 2002.

The status and performance of the satellite (platform and payload) is good. All prime equipment is still used. The on-board resources are efficiently used providing the option to extend the mission for many years beyond the nominal mission phase of 2 years. The mission has now been extended to December 2008.

Observation proposals, sent in reply to the first INTEGRAL announcement of opportunity, requested 19 times more exposure time than available. The ground segment is in charge to use INTEGRAL efficiently and to optimize the scientific return of the mission.

The operations of the INTEGRAL mission are split between 3 centres. The INTEGRAL Science Operation Centre (ISOC, located in ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands) derives the sequence of observations to be executed from the accepted proposals. Those sequences are converted to operational timelines by the flight control team at the Mission Operation Center (MOC, located in ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany) and are used to control the satellite. The MOC also monitors the satellite safety and health. TM and appropriate auxiliary data are forwarded to the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre (ISDC, located in Versoix, Switzerland). The ISDC analyzes the TM on different time scales and produces and distributes science alerts and data products to the scientific community.

2. The INTEGRAL Science Operation Centre

The main role of the INTEGRAL Science Operations Centre, is to put together an observation program based on accepted proposals. For each revolution, ISOC provides to the MOC a timeline of what targets are to be observed with which instrument settings. To put together a schedule is a complex task. Besides the proposals themselves, the planning process takes into account, e.g., proposal priority, target visibility and spacecraft constraints, efficiency, i.e., minimizing the time spent in slewing.

The ISOC systems supporting proposal capture, handling and scheduling are centered around an ORACLE data base. All ISOC software is written in JAVA. The ISOC proposal generation and submission is unique. All proposers generate their proposals using a downloaded JAVA application. All proposals are prepared locally and when ready they can be submitted using the same application. The sending of a proposal only takes seconds of load on the ISOC system which fully supports heavy peak loads and avoids the usual bottle necks, that occur before a proposal submission deadline.

3. The INTEGRAL Mission Operation Centre

The INTEGRAL flight operations are conducted from the Mission Operations Centre (MOC). The two prime ground stations that ensure real time contact with the satellite 68 hours out of the 72 hours orbit are the ESA station in Redu, Belgium, and the NASA station at Goldstone, California.

The science operations are very demanding. For example, due to the design of the payload, the spacecraft attitude is to be changed every 30 minutes, which requires a highly automated control system. The telemetry (TM) that is received continuously from the satellite and the auxiliary data are processed in real time and have to be distributed within the various centers of the ground segment.

The MOC uses generic infrastructure that is provided by the European Space Operation Centre (ESOC). The routine operations are highly automated. In order to operate the satellite in the most efficient way new software tools have been applied for the first time: the S2K infrastructure for the monitoring and control system and the new Space Link Extension (SLE) protocol for the interface to the NASA ground stations at Goldstone.

4. The INTEGRAL Science Data Centre

The INTEGRAL Science Data Center receives the telemetry, broadcasts gamma-ray burst alerts in real-time, monitors the status of the scientific instruments, searches for new and transient sources within few hours of the observation, performs a standard analysis of the data, archives 2 TB of compressed data per year and distributes them to the scientific community with analysis software.

The ISDC is provided to the mission by the scientific community through a consortium led by the Geneva Observatory. The ISDC staff increased from 2 in 1995 to about 40 people at launch. The software and hardware systems were built and integrated locally following the ESA quality standards. A large fraction of the analysis software was developed by the teams providing the scientific instruments.

Several key design decisions were made early in the ISDC project:

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Use only FITS as data format (most data files are compressed);
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Keep all data on-line on hard disks;
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Control all interfaces using IRAF parameter files and the data format of every FITS extension through CFITSIO template files.
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Build each analysis step with a standalone executable (FTOOL concept);
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Customize a public domain and modern environment (CERN's ROOT) to develop analysis scripts and applications (Rohlfs et al, this volume);
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Use OPUS developed at the STSCI to control the processing flow (Beck et al, this volume);
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Use a single operating system for operations (SUN/Solaris) but port the analysis software on Linux as well;
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Use HEASARC's W3Browse as archive interface and distribute all data through the internet (Meharga et al, this volume)

The INTEGRAL data model and implementation has been developed to allow scientific analysis with thousands of different datasets without the need for a Database Management System. As INTEGRAL spends a considerable fraction of the time dithering around the target that is being observed, about a hundred pointings or slews are performed every day and a new dataset is created for each of them. Those datasets can be grouped in an arbitrary way for scientific analysis. The FITS grouping convention has been extensively used (O'Neel et al, this volume) to build observation datasets and various indexing tables.

Several key applications have been developed:

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A library of tools to receive and broadcast CCSDS telemetry and to wrap it to FITS format.
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A real-time multi-threaded system made of several concurrent and communicating processes to extract the relevant information from the telemetry, searches for gamma-ray bursts using various algorithms in the data of the different instruments, filter the triggers and broadcasts gamma-ray burst alerts over the internet.
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An application to decommute the telemetry and store the complete information in FITS format. The decommutation is driven by the S2K database for the decoding of the housekeeping telemetry and by specific code for each of the scientific telemetry packet (Morisset et al, this volume).
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Several processing pipelines have been written to handle data sets derived from the telemetry as well as auxiliary files.
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A set of portable graphical user interfaces to browse, display and perform simple analysis of the data and of the results of the scientific quick-look analysis (Lerusse et al, this volume).
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A set of analysis scripts (with user interfaces, Beck et al, this volume) calling the scientific software modules written in part by the teams building the instruments. Those scripts are used with standard parameters for automated analysis and are also distributed to the scientific community for offline analysis.
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An archive, indexing and distribution system used to ingest, store and distribute on line all INTEGRAL data (Meharga et al, this volume).

The software was built as much as possible mission independent and a part is currently being reused for the Planck mission (Türler et al, this volume). Tools have also been developed to manage software deliveries, configuration and automatic testing (Beck et al, this volume).

5. Conclusions

From the user's perspective, the INTEGRAL operations are very successful:

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The planning overhead has been minimized such that more than 96% of the available time is used for scientific observations.

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Science operations during the first nominal year of the mission will be completed as planned. Target of opportunity observations have been scheduled in less than one revolution.

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The accuracy of the mission auxiliary data necessary for science analysis mission exceeds the performance requirements.

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Gamma-ray burst alerts are broadcast on the internet within 30 seconds. 13 new gamma-ray sources have been detected in the Galaxy and announced often within one day, which generated about 60 IAU circulars or astronomical telegrams.

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Real time data have been made available to observers within 3 hours. First public data have been made available in the archive 2 months after the end of the performance-verification (PV) phase. First data resulting from the standard analysis together with analysis software were distributed to observers 3 months after the end of the PV phase.
The performance of the INTEGRAL ground segment meet the requirements defined prior to launch and are essential for the scientific return of the mission.
© Copyright 2004 Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, California 94112, USA
Next: Data Processing at the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre
Up: High Performance Computing
Previous: Preliminary design of the SCUBA-2 Data Reduction Pipeline
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