ESA Collaboration on the AKARI Mission

ESA collaborates with ISAS/JAXA on the AKARI mission. Tracking support for several passes per day has been provided by ESOC in the cold phase of the mission, thus increasing the data coverage. The production of the all sky survey catalogues is enhanced by the pointing reconstruction provided by ESAC/ESA, whereby the time history of the alignment between the satellite sensors and the focal plane detectors is reconstructed by correlating the events detected in the Focal Plane NIR and MIR detectors with specially made input reference catalogues. The resulting positional accuracy is at the arcsecond level. In return, ESA received 10% of the observing opportunities in the non-survey parts of the mission, which is distributed to European scientists. Two Calls, for the AKARI cold and post-Helium phases, have been prepared by ESAC/ESA, in close collaboration with the Japanese teams, and issued in parallel to ISAS/JAXA, resulting in respectively 28 and 11 successful programs. ESAC also contributes to the data analysis documentation deemed necessary for the users.