The Austrian HERSCHEL/PACS On-Board Reduction Work Package

Author(s)
Roland Ottensamer, Franz Kerschbaum, Christian Reimers, Ahmed Nabil Belbachir, Horst Bischof
Abstract

ESA's cornerstone mission HERSCHEL is an ambitious infrared and sub-mm satellite to be launched in 2007. It will have a radiatively cooled 3.5m telescope and a science payload complement of three instruments (HIFI, PACS, SPIRE) housed inside a superfluid helium cryostat. The Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) instrument employs in total four novel photoconductor and bolometer arrays covering the 57 to 210 micron range. The Austrian participation covers on-board reduction and compression software to cope with the high readout rate and the low telemetry bandwidth limited by the spacecraft's distant orbit around L2. The high raw data rates force us not only to use highly specialized lossless compression algorithms, but also to carry out irreversible reduction steps that are normally done on ground. So special attention must be given to the fact that future astronomers may no longer have access to raw data but only to at least partly reduced data products.

Organisation(s)
Department of Astrophysics
External organisation(s)
Technische Universität Graz
Journal
Hvar Observatory Bulletin
Volume
26
Pages
77 - 80
No. of pages
4
ISSN
0351-2657
Publication date
2002
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103003 Astronomy, 103004 Astrophysics
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/cec0f49f-3baa-4601-bbdd-bb96470853e4