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INTEGRAL Latest News 11th Announcement of Opportunity (AO-11): preliminary statistics 23 April 2013 The deadline for the submission of proposals for AO-11 open time observations was on 12 April 2013, and all proposals are in the ISOC database. Below are some preliminary statistics on the proposals that have been received.
Total number of proposals
The total number of proposals received is 55. The total observing time requested is about 62 Msec (for all types of observation, i.e. fixed time, normal time, and ToO). Here, 10% of the requested total ToO time has been taken into account. Given that up to about 24 Msec of observing time (for new observing proposals) will be available for the AO-11 observing programme (12 months duration starting on 1 January 2014), this corresponds to an oversubscription in time by a factor of 2.6.
Proposals per category
In the following table we give the breakdown of number of proposals as a function of the proposal category. Note that the numbers on requested observing times do include ToO proposals, but it has been assumed here, that a typical ToO proposal requests about 10% of its total observing time as entered into PGT from all the candidate sources included in a ToO proposal. Scientific Category
| Number of proposals | Requested observing time (Ms),
includes ToO times x 10%
| Galactic Astronomy
| 38
| 39.8
| Extragalactic Astronomy
| 11 | 14.9 | Nucleosynthesis and diffuse
continnum/line emission
| 6
| 7.6
| Total
| 55 | 62.4 | The Time Allocation Committee will peer review end May all proposals and will recommend the AO-11 observing programme to ESA.
A second Call within this AO-11 will be released on 9 September, inviting proposals on individual point sources or selected sky areas (for diffuse emission studies) to be associated as "data-right proposals" with the selected observations, excluding ToO observations. The deadline for submission of data rights proposal will be 4 October 2013.
Christoph Winkler
INTEGRAL Project Scientist
23 April 2013  INTEGRAL continues observing Mkn 421 17 April 2013 Mrk 421 will continue to be observed in revolution 1284 since it is still bright in both the JEM-X and ISGRI instruments.
Two ToOs in a row! 15 April 2013 Mrk 421 recently exhibited an extremely bright flaring in high energies detected by NuSTAR (ATel #4974), MAGIC and VERITAS (ATel #4976), Fermi-LAT and Swift-XRT (ATel #4977) and MAXI (ATel #4978). INTEGRAL ToO observations of this extraordinary event were requested by Dr. E. Pian. In less than a few hours, ISOC evaluated and planned the requested observations, to start as soon as the on-going ToO observations of the ms pulsar IGR J18245-2452 are completed. INTEGRAL we will observe Mkn 421 for ~200 ks in revolution 1283. Further observations might be planned depending on the source evolution. Stay tuned and watch our news there!
ToO observations of IGR J18245-2452 11 April 2013 INTEGRAL will perform Target of Opportunity observations on the recently discovered X-ray transient IGR J18245-2452 (ATel #4925 , #4927 , #4929 , #4934 , #4959 , #4960). The observations will start on 2013-04-13 03:56:15 (Rev. 1282) and will last 210 ksec. Please consult the INTEGRAL scheduling pages for more information. XMM-Newton will be observing the source simultaneously during 70 ksec, starting on 2013-04-13 06:08:15 (Rev. 2444). More details can be found in the XMM-Newton schedulling pages.
INTEGRAL AO-11 Call for Observing Proposals is open! 4 March 2013 Today, the Director of Science and Robotic Exploration (Prof. Alvaro Giménez) has released the 11th Announcement of Opportunity for observing proposals with INTEGRAL. This announcement solicits proposals for observations to be carried out from January 2014 for a period of 12 months. Proposers from all over the world are welcome to participate. All proposals will be subject to an independent peer review by the INTEGRAL Time Allocation Committee (TAC). The deadline for Proposals submission is Friday 12 April 2012, 14:00 CEST. Observing proposals selected for AO-11 will subsequently be open for so-called "data right proposals" via a second Call for Proposals. These associated proposals allow the possibility to obtain data rights on point-like, extended sources or emission features contained in the field of view of accepted observing proposals.
More information can be found on the AO-11 page. Proceedings of the INTEGRAL workshop on-line 26 February 2013 The first set of accepted papers of the workshop proceedings "An INTEGRAL view of the high energy sky (the first 10 years)" is now available on-line. More to be expected soon. INTEGRAL operations were suspended for ~10 hours on friday night (15/16 Feb 2013)
18 February 2013 Due to unfortunate and unforeseen circumstances connected to the combined XMM-Newton/INTEGRAL spacecraft operations team, there was no possibility for human control of INTEGRAL operations for a 10 hour period, friday night. For safety reasons the satellite was left at the attitude which it reached at the end of the evening shift at the Missions Operations Centre (i.e., one of the pointings towards 1H 0323+342, proposal 1020027), from about 19:30. The IBIS and SPI instruments were put into a safe configuration, while JEM-X and OMC were left on to take data.
On Saturday 16 February, in the morning, IBIS and SP operations resumed smoothly at around 07:55, and the nominal timeline was followed again.
New observations of Swift J174510.8-262411 in decay
6 February 2013 After the 1 Ms approved Target of Opportunity on the X-ray transient Swift J174510.8-262411 which started last September 12th 2012, INTEGRAL will perform another 220 ks observations on that source, starting on February 16th. This X-ray binary is now in outburst decay and shows radio emission (see ATels #4760 and #4782). The PI of the observation is Dr Kalemci.
Please consult the scheduling pages for more information.
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