How surprising the life can be! In 1998 I was preparing my Physics diploma in the University of Geneva. And more precisly, I was preparing it under the supervision of an excellent professor Thierry Courvoisier, also the boss of the INTEGRAL Data Center (ISDC) in Ecogia, near the Geneva Observatory in Versoix (Geneva’s suburb, Switzerland).
During these fascinating times for me was the heavy preparation of a big ESA mission: the INTEGRAL satellite for observations in the gamma-ray regime, a very harsh and difficult one!
I was a too young scientist to participate, but I could see the intense work of my supervisor and my director. The ISDC is a wonderful and quiet place outside the Geneva city, but lots of people from Europe and beyond were coming to have strong discussions about the bazillions of details such mission require.
Tonight, just a few minutes ago, while I am preparing a talk about Arcsecond, I receive the following annoucement from NASA’s General Coordinates Network (GCN):
Beginning March 4, 2025 at 12:08:04 UT, data from the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) will no longer be transmitted to the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre (ISDC), due to the end of scientific operations, more than 22 years after its launch. As a consequence, the INTEGRAL Burst Alert System (IBAS) will be discontinued and GCN Notices will no longer be distributed. The full archive of INTEGRAL GCN Notices is available at https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/integral.html.
The IBAS team thank the scientific community for the continuous support. The GCN team thank INTEGRAL for being an important contributor to GCN over the last 22 years.
The mission pages for GCN Notice producers that are no longer operational have been moved to a submenu for archived missions, including AGILE, BurstCube, and INTEGRAL (https://gcn.nasa.gov/missions/archive).
This news was also reported by the INTEGRAL team in GCN Circular 39563.
Bye bye INTEGRAL! How amazingly long and fruitful your mission was!
No responses yet