22 years of INTEGRAL catching results and discoveries
The 2024 INTEGRAL Workshop was held from October 21-24 at ESAC
near Madrid, Spain. There were 91 registered participants, and
53 oral and 3 poster presentations were given. There were, following
the presentations, many constructive exchanges touching on a great
variety of science topics and perspectives. Links to the final programme,
slides and video recordings will be available on the conference web site.
The workshop took place with knowledge that INTEGRAL will be taking data
for only another 4 months, but it was emphasised that the end of taking
fresh data is not the end of the mission, and the activities of the community
determine how much longer INTEGRAL will live on. It is ESA's experience that
the publication rate during the post-operations phase increases indicating
that science exploration during the operations phase focuses on fresh data
while a large reservoir of older data provides even more material for research.
The focus of this workshop was current and recent research. A legacy conference
will take place towards the end of 2026 at which retrospectives and results
from archival data can be presented. The current focus of the INTEGRAL science
operations centre at ESAC is to lay the foundations for research with INTEGRAL
data in the decades to come. The science community and Users Group were encouraged
to take part in populating the INTEGRAL Science Legacy Archive (ISLA) whose basic
functionalities were presented on Monday. In addition, perspectives for long-term
preservation of the OSA software via ESA DataLabs were presented and shown in
action during a live demo on Tuesday.
The image shows the group photo of 2024 INTEGRAL Workshop participants taken on October 22 at ESAC.
