Institute of 4D Technologies

Researchers of the Data Space group of i4Ds explore and develop new concepts and methods for the processing of the Herschel data. These methods aim at easing access to and analysis of complex scientific data significantly. Through the cooperation with i4Ds, the Institute of Astronomy at ETH Zurich, which will exploit the data, expects a significant boost in getting to scientific results. Furthermore, i4Ds expects to transfer the concepts and methods to industrial projects.

Herschel will be launched on an Ariane rocket together with the satellite Planck. It will fly to the second Lagrangian point, a place in space where all forces acting on the spacecraft are compensated. This point is 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.

Herschel is built and operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). I holds three onboard instruments. HIFI, SPIRE and PACS are developed by three European consortia.
We are involved mainly on HIFI, or Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared. It costs about 80 million Euros. The HIFI experiment on the Herschel mission is technologically a very large step in the spectroscopy of the 0.5 – 2 Terahertz region. Not only the collecting area of the prime mirror is more than an order of magnitude larger than in previous missions, but also HIFI’s mixers have considerably less noise and more sensitivity. The most important step, however, is in spectral resolution, which appears to be sufficient for all scientific purposes. Although not without competition from ground and space, HIFI will be at the technological frontier for many years to come. This is certainly true for all observations in spectral bands blocked out by absorption in the terrestrial atmosphere. In particular, HIFI water line observations will probably be the best during the next decade. Considering the uniqueness of HIFI data, they will be analyzed for decades and must be conserved in a form usable also in the future.

HIFI software development is coordinated by the HIFI Instrument Control Center (ICC) at SRON in Groningen. The development is part of the Herschel Common Software System (HCSS). It is a collaboration of people from many countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. The HIFI software development is closely coordinated with the Herschel Common Software System provided by ESA.

More information

Herschel at ESA, Herschel at ETH, Herschel at FHNW

Project Participants

Project Team

• Andre Csillaghy
• Martin Melchior
• Marco Soldati
• Dominik Plüsch

Project Partners (only those involved in "Data Processing Software Development")

• ETH Zurich
• Netherlands Space Research Institute SRON
• European Space Technology Center, ESA, Nordwik, Netherlands
• Centre d'Etude Spatiales du Rayonnemen (CESR) Toulouse, France
• Instituto de Estructura de  la Materia, CSIC, Madrid
• European Space Astronomy Center, ESA, Madrid
• Observatorio di Arcetri, Firenze,  Italia
• Universität zu Köln
• Caltech / JPL / NHSC, California