Herschel-HIFI News

By | | News and Announcements

De/from Sylvie Beaulieu, Herschel-HIFI Instrument Support Scientist
(Cassiopeia – Spring/printemps 2016)
Herschel_spacecraft_artist410

Herschel Science Archive (HSA)

The latest Herschel Science Archive is v.7.1.1. It was released on 8 February 2016. In this release, you will find links from individual observations associated to refereed publications. This feature is accessible from the query result page in the HSA User Interface by selecting the “DETAILS & PUBLICATIONS” button, and then clicking on the tab “Publications”. Footprints for photometric observations (PACS & SPIRE) greatly improve the accuracy of geometrical searches. Herschel data are 100% public domain.

Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE)

The current HIPE release is version 14.0.1, with HIFI_CAL_24_0 as its latest Calibration Tree. All changes included in this release are highlighted in the What’s New in HIPE page. Additional information can be found in the HIFI Instrument and Calibration page. In April, the HSC will release HIPE 14.1. Further details can be found below but your main source of information about changes in HIPE is from the links included above.

What’s New in HIPE 14.1

The changes highlighted below reflect changes that occurred in the developper’s track but that are coming up in 14.1. We invite you to continue to monitor the What’s New in HIPE for future changes.

While working on the Expert Reduced Products, the calibration team discovered that in HIPE 14.0 the flag SPUR_WARNING, which is meant to be just a warning, is actually being honoured in the fitBaseline task. For data that contain this flag, the task will simply ignore the data without allowing you to decide if the warning is severe enough to justify an automatic rejection of the data concerned. The task has been corrected in 14.1 to allow you to display the data with its SPUR_WARNING mask. The onus is then on you to decide if the data with the SPUR_WARNING flag need to be rejected. The task fitBaseline allows you to add a mask (using a flag like IGNORE_DATA) on the bad data. We invite you to consult the HIFI Data Reduction Guide for further information on the details of running the task fitBaseline.

Documentation

Herschel documentation can be accessed through HIPE and the HSC and has been updated to version 14.0.1. Eventually, you will be able to access the Herschel Explanatory Legacy Library as the permanent site for all documentations related to Herschel. The release date is not yet available at the time of writing this newsletter. For the moment, we advise you to visit the HSC page on a regular basis.

University of Waterloo Group News

By the time you read this news segment, the Herschel-HIFI Waterloo group will be shutting down, ceasing operation on the 31st of March 2016. Although no support will be available from that date via the Waterloo group, we will try to maintain the webpage live, and as up-to-date as possible. All links to data reduction and documentation will eventually be pointing to the Herschel Science Centre (HSC) at the European Space Agency. Any enquiries should be redirected to the HSC Helpdesk.

The implementation of the Herschel Explanatory Legacy Library (HELL) is progressing well but is not yet available to the public at the time of writing this news segment. Permanent links to the ESA Herschel Project and to the Herschel Explanatory Legacy Library will be available through our webpage as soon as a release date is announced.

The University of Waterloo Herschel HIFI Support Group highly encourages you to continue to browse through the wonderful public Herschel data through the Herschel Science Archive (HSA). Our webpage will remain live but in a static mode. The page has a dedicated section on Data Processing. It was a privilege to support the Canadian community.

A final word from Mike Fich

The formal end of the Herschel mission has arrived. However, as with all good observatories, the data will provide years of good science. Our HIFI team has worked hard to put all of the data into good, well-reduced form so that anyone can make use of it in the future with minimal time investment in learning about the data reduction process. The software and documentation for both the data and all of the software is now complete and included in the archives for future users.

I am proud of what our team has produced and would like to thank all of those who have helped us over the almost twenty years since we began working on this mission. Participation in this project has been one of the defining endeavours of my career and a highpoint that I will always remember and treasure. Thank-you!

Conferences, workshops and webinars related to Herschel

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