A fruitful Consortium Meeting #8

The eighth X-IFU Consortium meeting was hosted by the University of Geneva. It span from September 10^th to 14^th. As usual, the meeting consisted of splinter meetings and plenary sessions. Beside the XSAT splinter and some technical meetings on JAXA coolers and on the Detector Cooling System, one splinter meeting was devoted to the preparation of the Instrument Preliminary Requirement Review (IPRR) documentation. The X-IFU Consortium Board met twice to prepare the Instrument Consortia Consolidation documentation, and iterated on the critical technologies and designs to be demonstrated before adoption.

The plenary sessions lasted two full days, giving sufficient time to review the status of the Athena mission, the baseline configuration of the instrument, and the status of all X-IFU subsystems. The last morning session of the meeting focused on science and performance related topics, and was concluded by presentations on the way forward to the IPRR. Let me take this opportunity to thank again the University of Geneva, and more particularly Enrico Bozzo, for hosting so smoothly the whole meeting in the beautiful city of Geneva. The next Consortium meeting will be in Grenoble, hosted by CEA-SBT.