The X-IFU Consortium meeting #11 goes virtual

This week, from 6th to 9th of April, the X-IU held its 11th Consortium meeting (CM11), fully virtually for the first time. This proved to be a very positive experience and both X-IFU’s Principal Investigator and Project Manager praised the high quality of the exchanges.

This CM11 was originally supposed to take place in Liège, Belgium. However, due to the COVID-19, the meeting had to be switched to a virtual one. This virtual setting allowed for a greater number of participants than expected during these meetings. Up to 171 people tuned in during the plenary session. With the time zones differences, this meant early mornings for our colleagues in the US, and late nights for our colleagues in Japan. Their participation was thus greatly appreciated.

Another highly positive aspect was the impact on the Consortium’s travel footprint. While a virtual event still has an environmental impact, an estimated 80 tons of CO2 were avoided thanks to this change. This has been a major concern for the Consortium over the past year, you can find out more about it in this article.

As during a regular CM, several sessions were held simultaneously. All with remarkable attendance. Several sub-plenaries took place, as well as meetings of the various X-IFU bodies, and the week ended on Thursday with a Project Managers’ meeting

Among many other topics, a key discussion during CM11 was related to the switch from Frequency Domain Multiplexing to Time Domain Multiplexing. Keep an eye out for the next X-IFU newsletter for more information on this.

Lastly, albeit virtual, this Consortium meeting remained a perfect opportunity to present the teaser for the new X-IFU video to be released in May 2020. You can find it on X-IFU’s YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/1L5z2KN79f4

We would like to thank all the speakers and participants for kindly adapting to these changes and helping us make this CM11 a success.

Whether it is a virtual or a physical meeting, the X-IFU Consortium never misses the opportunity to take its group picture (and these are only the ones with the video turned on).