XAssist: A System for the Automation of X-ray Astrophysics Analysis

Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0303104

From: Andrew Ptak <ptak@pha.jhu.edu>

Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 04:18:13 GMT   (165kb)

Authors:
A. Ptak (JHU),
R. Griffiths (CMU)

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of Astronomical Data
Analysis Software and Systems XII, October 2002, Baltimore, MD

XAssist is a NASA AISR-funded project for the automation of X-ray
astrophysics, with emphasis on galaxies. It is nearing completion of its
initially funded effort, and is working well for Chandra and ROSAT HRI data.
Initial support for XMM-Newton data is present as well. It is capable of data
reprocessing, source detection, and preliminary spatial, temporal and spectral
analysis for each source with sufficient counts. The bulk of the system is
written in Python, which in turn drives underlying software (CIAO for Chandra
data, etc.). Future work will include a GUI (mainly for beginners and status
monitoring) and the exposure of at least some functionality as web services.
The latter will help XAssist to eventually become part of the VO, making
advanced queries possible, such as determining the X-ray fluxes of counterparts
to HST or SDSS sources (including the use of unpublished X-ray data), and add
the ability of “on-the-fly” X-ray processing. Pipelines are running on ROSAT,
Chandra and now XMM-Newton observations of galaxies to demonstrate XAssist’s
capabilities, and the results are available online (in real time) at
this http URL . XAssist itself as well as various associated projects
are available for download.

References and citations for this submission:

SLAC-SPIRES HEP (refers to ,
cited by, arXiv reformatted)