Programme Management

Management of the XID programme

The Pipeline Processing Subsystem (PPS) for XMM, which will be run at Leicester University by the SSC, will produce a number of products for each XMM observation. Besides being delivered to the XMM Science Operations Centre (SOC), they will also be stored at Leicester for the XID programme.

The PPS products for the EPIC images contain a list of the X-ray sources found in that observation, with all potentially useful information (position, extracted spectrum, etc.).
 
This primary source list is then cross-correlated with an extensive list of existing catalogues built in the Archival Multiwavelength Database (AMW-DB) at OAS (Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg), which includes APM and SuperCOSMOS (when available) scans of the optical sky survey plates. This allows the possibility of tweaking the astrometry of every particular EPIC observation to an absolute reference frame. These source lists will be used for the XID programme.

The XID activities, other than the cross-correlation work with catalogues, are coordinated and supported by the SSC node at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL). In short MSSL is responsible for the overall coordination of the XID programme and maintenance of the XID database which will ingest all the data resulting from observing runs within the XID programme. It will also provide assistance in terms of source lists, quality standards for the observations, etc. Access to the non-proprietary data is granted to the whole SSC consortium.

Management of the optical programme

The optical XID programme is expected to include collaborators from outside the Survey Science Centre, who participate in it on a collaborative basis.

Coordination of the XID programme will imply the following tasks:


The scientific exploitation of the data within the SSC consortium and its external collaborators, in terms of spin-off results, will be overseen by the XID Working Group.

This plan is based on our previous experience. A number of members of the SSC have participated in international collaborations (RIXOS, EMSS, RBS, etc,). Lessons learned from these previous experiences of special relevance to the XID programme include:


Last modified 10th March 2000
Text based on AXIS proposal by X.Barcons and the SSC consortium.
Page designed by J.Verdon and maintained by www_astro@mssl.ucl.ac.uk