iow_20101221 - Gaia

Image of the Week

The 100th member of CU3

On 17 December, DPAC's "Core Processing" coordination unit (CU3), the biggest and most complex one among the eight existing CUs, reached the magic number of 100 active members. The record was set by the addition of Chris Skoog, a new master student at Lund Observatory. In January he will start to work on AGIS-related topics for his master thesis - and of course also for the benefit of the final AGIS solution, to be derived in 2021 or so.

The picture shows the 100th member (top left), along with the group photo of the very first CU3 plenary meeting (top right, February 2006 at Heidelberg, with 37 attendees out of about 55 members at the time) and the group photo of the as-yet biggest CU3 meeting (bottom, April 2009 at Torino, with 57 out of about 90 members at the time).

With quite some probability Chris will leave CU3 in about a year, when he has got his master degree. But the number of CU3 members will drop back to below 100 much sooner, actually within a few weeks: At the beginning of each calendar year the CU3 manager checks whether all names on the list are actually still there and active. In this way, in every January a few people (typically less than a handful) are found who left "unnoticed" during the year: Students who finished their terms, postdocs who moved to other areas, or meritorious older colleagues who retired. The actual number of departures per year is of course higher than that.

[Published: 21/12/2010]