Dr. Katja Weingrill

Gaia

I am working for the ESA Satellite Gaia, that since 2014 constantly observes our Milky Way. Within the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortiuum (DPAC) I contribute to two Coordination Units (CU), CU3 "Core Processing" and CU6 "Spectroscopic Processing".

In CU3 I am manager of the newly developed pipeline for Service Interface Function (SIF) images of dense regions in the sky, so called Crowded Fields (CF). The SIF CF team is writing software to detect new sources in the two dimensional Gaia Sky Mapper images, that Gaia has so far not been able to detect, because of the natural limitations a readout window strategy has in very dense regions. Once all images are analysed, a crossmatch is done for all Gaia scans of a certain region and new Gaia sources are defined from the single detections. For these sources the pipeline determines astrometry and photometry. The goal is to increase the completeness of the Gaia catalogues in nine selected dense regions, and also to provide the newly found sources to other downstream systems within Gaia DPAC for better scene building.

In CU6, my main role is the software development of a background correction for the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS). This background correction consists of two parts: The modelling of the light distribution of unobserved point sources on the detector, if these contaminate observed source spectra, and the measuring of the diffuse background light in empty parts of the readout windows, that due to the straylight that during commissioning turned out to be 40 times as intensive as expected is crutial to the RVS data reduction. I am member of the CU6 Configuration Control Board (CCB).

Mini CV

I was born in Bremerhaven, studied both Mathematics and Physics at the Georg-August University in Göttingen and concluding 1999 with a Masters degree.

With a scholarship I finished my PhD thesis on "structure and dynamics of solar small scale magnetic fields" in 2003. For roughly 10 years I worked as a solar physicist at the Göttingen University and Arcetri Florence. My main topics were height dependency and fractal dimensions of small scale structures on the sun. I developed IDL software applications for automated pattern recognition, the analysis of Hausdorff dimensions and improved the speckle image reconstruction code, that treats 5-dimensional data (space, time, wavelength and polarimetry, i.e. time series of two dimensional spectral line scan images for two polarimetric states).

At the AIP, I contributed to the cryo test software of NIRSpec / James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). I worked as manager of the PEPSI group, that built the Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument for the LBT, and for innoFSPEC, a centre forinnovational competence for fibre spectroscopy and sensing. In 2010 I came back to software writing, when I joined Gaia DPAC. Since then I'm enthusiastic about preparing the next spectacular data release of Gaia.