Finland joined ESO in July 2004. As part of its joining fee resources were made available to perform a three year study of future needs for the ESO community in the area of data reduction and analysis environments.

The project started in January 2005 and was managed by ESO with the staff based in Finland. The name Sampo Project was adopted after the powerful mystical artifact, Sampo in Finnish mythology. The project was divided into several subprojects addressing different areas of future environments. These included the challenges of the Virtual Observatory, future astronomical instrumentation and also ways in which the heritage of legacy software could be best exploited.

Scientific oversight came from a Finnish Astronomical Advisory Group (FAAG), a Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC), representing the ESO science community and input from the Opticon N3.6 network on Future Astronomical Software Environments.

One major result of Sampo was an experimental graphical workflow system for running data reduction recipes. After the end of Sampo this idea was developed further, using newer technology and a system called Reflex is now available.

The Sampo project ended at the end of January 2008.

Further information is available through the following links: