The Herschel Space Observatory is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission conceived to provide spectroscopic and photometric observations at far infrared and sub-millimetre wavelengths.
This section contains an overall description of the mission (Observatory) and of the scientific instruments on board the satellite (PACS, SPIRE and HIFI).

Herschel is conceived as a Space Observatory open to the entire astronomical community. The Routine Science Phase started in January 2010, about 7 months after the launch, following a Commissioning Phase, a Performance Verification Phase and a Science Demonstration Phase.
Roughly, half of the Routine Science Phase observing time is still allocated to Key Programmes , while the remaining 'open time' is available for the worldwide scientific community and will be allocated using a standard competitive proposal procedure, through Announcement of Opportunities.
Information regarding tools for the preparation and submission of proposals (HSPOT and HROST) can be accessed here.

The Herschel payload includes three scientific instruments built to perform photometry and spectroscopy in different wavelengths and with different techniques.
Several observing modes are available:

• PACS
• Photometry
• Spectroscopy
• SPIRE
• Photometry
• Spectroscopy
• HIFI
• Spectroscopy
• PACS/SPIRE Parallel Mode

Data received from the Herschel Observatory are reduced using the standard pipeline. Each observing mode has a specific task to process data from raw data (satellite output) to final scientific data. All the pipelines are accessible using the Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE), a user friendly interface which assists the user through the data reduction steps, from access to the ESA database up to the final products. In this section usefull links are available to have information about instrument data processing.