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Session 55 - Space Instrumentation.
Display session, Wednesday, June 12
Tripp Commons,

[55.02] ACIS Ground Software Development at Penn State

J. A. Nousek, P. S. Broos, S. Koch (Penn State)

In early 1997 the AXAF mirrors and X-ray instruments will meet for the first time at NASA's X-ray Calibration Facility (XRCF) for a lengthy calibration of the combined payload. As beam time for calibration is precious, we will continuously monitor the calibration experiments to catch problems instantly. We are developing software which carries out near-real-time science analysis of the X-ray event data produced by ACIS, the CCD Imaging Spectrometer on AXAF.

This software consists of two systems: ATICA, which extracts the ACIS science data from the AXAF telemetry stream, recognizes individual packetized messages in the ACIS telemetry stream, groups those messages into meaningful data sets, and stores those data sets in FITS format; and TARA, which provides the scientist with easy-to-use, interactive tools for displaying and analyzing images, spectra and time series of the in-coming ACIS data.

ATICA is written in C and will likely also be used to process ACIS telemetry on orbit. TARA is largely written in IDL and is designed to interface easily with XSPEC and other XANADU analysis packages, and PROS and other IRAF packages.

We will provide this software to the AXAF Science Center and all other interested scientists, carrying into the flight observations period of AXAF. We encourage interested parties to contact us with any requests for data display, analysis, and selection criteria which you wish to see in the ACIS analysis software.

Program listing for Wednesday