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6. ISO AS AN OBSERVATORY
This workshop has shown the power of a single instrument, intensely studied to properly characterize all its features, and used by a large number of observers all sharing information to perfect the characterization. It has shown the importance of the stability of conditions in space, and of systematic, periodic updates of calibrations and the tracking of slowly varying instrumental characteristics. The process is not yet complete. A great deal of additional information about the detectors, telescope and their properties remains to be extracted before we are all done. But the possibility of learning from each other as we begin to better understand our data and the instruments that obtained them, will yield a far richer lode of interpretable observations than if we were individually trying to use some arbitrary telescope.
This cooperative attitude is responsible for much of the observatory's success. We owe the Instrument Teams, the Instrument Data teams, and the operations specialists a great debt of thanks for their hard work on the community's behalf.
All of us also wish to thank Martin Kessler for organizing this workshop, and the entire staff at Villa Franca for mounting such a well organized, outstandingly interesting meeting for the broad research community.
Martin Harwit