Continued Post-Launch Support of XMM Newton in the UK: the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre

The XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre (SSC) is an international collaboration involving a consortium of 10 institutions in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The SSC plays a major scientific role in the XMM-Newton project including: (i) the development and maintenance of the XMM-Newton science analysis software; (ii) the routine scientific processing of all XMM-Newton observations; (iii) the ground-based follow-up/identification programme for the XMM-Newton serendipitous survey; (iv) the compilation of the XMM-Newton Source Catalogues. These activities play an important role in the scientific success of XMM-Newton. To take one example, the XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogues provide a major resource that enable astronomers to explore the population of X-ray emitting objects in the sky. These include some of the most exotic objects currently known, including supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies, the hot gas that fills the space between the galaxies in clusters, dramatically active stars with hot coronae, binary systems powered by accretion onto a neutron star or black hole and the shock-heated gaseous remnants of supernova explosions.