The premature end of XRS was a huge shock to everybody involved in the mission. Both NASA and JAXA convened panels of experts to identify what went wrong. After the hard work by the team members and outside experts alike, we know the specific problem that caused the rapid loss of helium - we plan to write it up for the Learning Center when the official report is released. It is a problem that is easy to correct in a future mission. The panels spent more time figuring out how this problem might have been spotted and corrected by the Suzaku team, and what future missions should do to avoid a similar problem. The key recommendation is better communication among the different subgroups within the team - between the spacecraft people and the instrument teams, and between the US members and the Japanese members.

One consequence of the loss is that the entire observing program for Suzaku had to be reviewed and revised. The original program was optimized for observations with XRS - so we replaced the original program with a new set of observations, both by the team members and by the outside "Guest Observers" (GOs). The team members had the exclusive right to observations through 2006 March, and observing times after 2006 April are awarded through open competition.

The team members have been looking at the mountain of data collected so far. With a mission like Suzaku, it takes time to understand and characterize how the instruments actually work in space. Such understanding has to be reflected in the software used to analyze the data. Often you see something unexpected, but until you know the properties of the instruments you are using, you can't be sure if it's really a new discovery about the object you are studying.

The team has been analyzing observations specifically designed to characterize the instruments, and looking at a wide range of other observations. We now have good enough understanding of the instruments, and are beginning to apply this knowledge to all the observations. We are ready to start doing science!

In fact, the first ever paper based on Suzaku observations has just been submitted to Astrophysical Journal. More will follow over the next few months. We'll start putting such results on the Suzaku Learning Center soon!

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