I am PACS scientist at the NASA Herschel Science Center at IPAC, Caltech.
My main task is supporting the American astronomical community to use the PACS instrument onboard Herschel.
Currently I am working on writing jython tasks to analyze results from ground testing of the PACS instrument. The language chosen by ESA for the Herschel software is java/jython. Jython is python in pure Java, essentialy a script language to use Java without knowing too much about it (the typical case for a scientist). The environment used for data reduction and analysis is called JIDE and a rich numerical/graphical library is currently under development. Although I was using IDL in my normal work (and I still use it ...), jython is pretty powerful and easy to learn (slightly more difficult than IDL mainly because of the lack of documentation). The good news is that everything is free software, i.e. no need to buy an expensive IDL license !