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17 – 21 October 2022
European Space Operations Centre
Darmstadt, Germany

Celebrating 20 years of INTEGRAL Operations on 17 October, we will use this opportunity to bring together key people from the early days of this ESA mission to share with us their experience that lead up to this successful mission, in addition to a science conference dedicated to high-energy astrophysics with INTEGRAL and other current and future missions.

The conference is intended to be a face-to-face meeting, hence re-enabling the long-missed networking possibilities and direct informal exchange on scientific and operational topics. A forum to highlight scientific achievements but also to shape the future of the scientific landscape enabling multi-messenger and high-energy astronomical research.

We take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support and interest in the INTEGRAL mission.

The abstract submission and registration for the conference is already open:

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/integral-2022

The AO-20 open time deadline was on 1 April 2022. The total number of proposals received was 52, and the total observing time requested is about 59 Msec. Assuming up to about 21 Msec of observing time for new observing proposals will be available for the AO-20 observing programme, this corresponds to an oversubscription in time by a factor of 2.8. The non-ToO proposals requested data rights for 316 sources in total.

In the table below 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.

In June the ESA Science Programme Committee (SPC) approved to extend the operations of INTEGRAL until March 2023. In November, the recommendation for a further extension will be discussed at  another SPC meeting, with the final decisions being taken only after the Council at ministerial level. The INTEGRAL TAC can therefore be held in October 2022. The AO20 observations will be carried out at least until March 2023, and possibly longer if INTEGRAL operations are extended beyond the March 2023 horizon. ISOC will keep the community informed of these developments in upcoming newsletters.

A new OSA version has been released by the ISDC. While the software itself contains minor updates, the most significant changes are related to the IBIS/ISGRI calibration which has now been standardised across the entire mission. This update was possible thanks to the work of Volodymyr Savchenko at ISDC, with support provided by ISOC, IBIS and SPI instrument teams. It provides a substantial improvement to the IBIS/ISGRI energy reconstruction, efficiency, and spectral response.  The software and calibration files can be downloaded from the ISDC.

• The 15+ Years of INTEGRAL Science special issue was published recently in New Astronomy Reviews:
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/new-astronomy-reviews/special-issue/10K9PV78WN4
• The 26th INTEGRAL Users Group Meeting took place in December 2021. The minutes of the meeting and presentations can be found here:
  https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/integral/iug-meeting-26