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HIFI Instrument Support Specialist

Department:

DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY

 Effective Date: September 2006
Grade: USG 9 Reports to: Dr. Michel Fich

General Accountability

This position reports to Dr. Michel Fich, the Canadian Lead Co-Investigator for HIFI. A principal activity of this position will be the development and maintenance of software in collaboration with members of the HIFI ICC and under the supervision of the ICC Manager, Dr. Peter Roelfsema.  This position is subject to continued funding of the CSA HIFI contract, which is planned to continue until March 2011.

HIFI is the high resolution spectrometer instrument for the Herschel Space Observatory, a far-infrared/submillimeter wavelength satellite observatory to be launched by the European Space Agency late in 2008.   A Canadian HIFI Team of astronomers is participating in this mission with support from the Canadian Space Agency. The Canadian HIFI Team requires a Support Scientist to: (1) support Canadian astronomers using HIFI and (2) work with the HIFI Instrument Control Centre (ICC) in The Netherlands.  

Nature and Scope

The Instrument Support Specialist will provide technical and scientific support to all Canadian HIFI scientists. This position requires a good working knowledge of astronomical observing techniques, especially in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelength ranges. The Instrument Support Specialist will be a member of the HIFI ICC team and will participate in most phases of ICC work. The HIFI ICC has the prime responsibility for the safe and efficient operation of the HIFI instrument.  The instrument is currently in the development phase and ICC personal are writing the software for instrument tests and are involved in the analysis of the test data.  In parallel, ICC staff are creating the procedures for operating and calibrating the instrument for pre-flight and in-flight operations.  Software tools for science data analysis are under development as well.

Statistical Data

Mission cost

~$500,000,000

Instrument cost

~$100,000,000

Canadian Team costs (primarily hardware)

~$6,000,000

Mission lifetime

2008-2011, possibly to 2013

Specific Accountabilities

Support Canadian HIFI Science Team:

Participate in ICC activities:

All operational software for the Herschel ground segment is developed using Object Oriented techniques with an object database as the backbone archive. Most of the operational tools are implemented using a combination of the Java and Jython languages. The instrument tests, operation and calibration work is done in close collaboration with the HIFI consortium partners, for the software development also a close collaboration with the other Herschel ground segment partners (the HSC, and the SPIRE and PACS ICC’s) has been established.

Working Conditions

With team members at times (especially during development) distributed over different geographical locations frequent travel for work related meetings, primarily in Europe, may be required. During a few phases in development (during instrument tests about 3 months) and operations (Check-Out and Performance Verification, in total about 2 months) ICC work will be under severe time pressure. In addition, directly supporting the Canadian HIFI team will require travel to a variety of Canadian universities. This position will be based in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo.