Tutors 2006 - ESAC Trainees

Dr. Marcus G. F. Kirsch is the scientific coordinator of the trainee project at ESAC. He is the calibration scientist of one of the main instruments onboard XMM-Newton: the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC). EPIC operates in the energy range from 0.2-15 keV and provides spatial, energy and timing information of objects in the X-ray sky. The European EPIC Consortium carries out the calibration of the EPIC camera where major calibration development is performed by the University of Leicester (UK) and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany). MK coordinates the EPIC Instrument Dedicated (EPIC-IDT) team at ESAC, that participates in the calibration efforts and transfers all important calibration information into Current Calibration Files (CCF) and/or software products using a major scientific analysis software package, the Scientific Analysis System (SAS), which is needed by observers for optimum scientific exploitation of the XMM-Newton observations performed.
Marcus Kirsch graduated 1999 at the University of Tübingen in Physics and Mathematics with the plan to become a teacher. The evolution went in a different direction and he finished his PhD on XMM-Newton calibration and the Crab pulsar in 2003 meanwhile working for ESA, but still very interested in the education business. His major research interests are high energy instrumentation of satellites as well as pulsars and X-ray binary systems.

Dr. Matteo Guainazzi got his Ph.D. in Astrophysics at the University "La Sapienza" (Rome, Italy) in October 1996. During his Ph.D he was visiting researcher at the Cosmic Radiation Laboratory of the RIKEN (Wako-shi, Japan). His scientific career has been mostly spent in community support for space missions, both on behalf of the Italian Space Agency (ASI; BeppoSAX, 1995-1997), and of the European Space Agency (XMM-Newton, 1999-now). In between, he pretty much enjoyed a two years post-doc Research Fellowship at ESTEC (Nordwijk, The Netherlands). Currently, M.Guainazzi is scientifically responsible for the XMM-Newton Science Archive (XSA). He is Scientist for the ESA Virtual Observatory as well. His main scientific interests are in the field of high-energy emission of Seyfert galaxies, and compact radio sources.

Dr. Martin Stuhlinger is an instrument and calibration scientist at the European Space Astronomy Centre, the successor of Bruno Altieri in the XMM-Newton EPIC team. Next to the health monitoring of the EPIC MOS instruments he is working on both the internal cross-calibration of XMM-Newtons X-ray instruments as well as the cross-calibration of XMM-Newton to other satellite missions.
Between 1998 and 2002 he developed at the University of Tübingen the real-time data handling and instrument control software of the IBIS experiment on-board of INTEGRAL satellite and attended the integration of the IBIS instrument during all qualification phases including the INTEGRAL commissioning after the satellite launch in October 2002. Before he started at ESAC in 2004, he joined the INTEGRAL Science Data Centre.
The scientific subject of his PhD was the X-ray monitoring of quasar 3C273 using RXTE and XMM-Newton.

Dr. Peter Kretschmar is the Science Operations Manager and Deputy Project Scientist for the Integral satellite. This medium sized ESA mission covers the energy range from 3 keV to 10 MeV plus the optical V-band, see, e.g., ESA Science & Technology: INTEGRAL for more details.
The Integral Science Operations Centre (ISOC) at ESAC is responsible for the scientific mission planning and for the handling of observing proposals.
Peter Kretschmar studied physics and astronomy in Tuebingen, were he received his PhD in 1996. After this he worked at the Integral Science Data Centre in Versoix (Geneva), Switzerland as specialist for the JEM-X and OMC instruments of Integral and later team leader of the Science Analysis Team. In 2005 he joined ESA as Operations Scientist and Deputy Project Scientist in ISOC. In November 2006 he became Integral Science Operations Manager.
Peter Kretschmar's scientific interests mainly focus on accreting X-ray pulsars and there especially on studies of the so-called "cyclotron lines", broad line structures caused by the enormous magnetic fields in these sources. Besides this he is involved in several other topics, e.g. studies of the Galactic Bulge region with Integral.
If you want to learn more about his research have a look at his bibliography.