The IACHEC (International Consortium for High-Energy Calibration) is an international consortium, gathering scientists involved in the calibration of the scientific payload of past, operational, and future high-energy astrophysics space missions. It aims to provide standards for high-energy calibration, and supervise cross-calibration among different missions. This goal is reached through Working Groups, where IACHEC scientists cooperate to define calibration standards and procedures. The scope of these Working Groups is primarily a practical one: a set of data and results (eventually published on refereed journals) will be the outcome of a coordinated and standardized analysis of references sources (“high-energy standard candles”). Past, present and future high-energy missions can use these results as a calibration reference.
In order to facilitate the calibration work of IACHEC scientists, the IACHEC “Heritage Working Group” decided in 2015 to create an IACHEC Source Database (ISD). The ISD is defined as the single repository of high-level scientific data and data analysis procedures used in IACHEC published papers.
The ISD has been funded and is being maintained by the AHEAD project under the EU Research Infrastructure Programme, in the framework of a direct collaboration with IACHEC. It is a public resource created for the benefit of the astrophysics observers community and it shall be populated whenever:
- An IACHEC paper is published on a refereed journal
- Updated calibrations with respect to that used in the aforementioned paper are published, and they have a “significant impact” on the results of the cross-calibration analysis, as verified by the Working Group and documented in a Technical Note, or in a new paper
- Paper and Technical Notes are supposed to be also ingested in the ISD, besides being available from the IACHEC web portal