National Aeronautics and Space Administration

• Introduction
• Caveats
• Running xtefilt to make a filter file

The following recipe details all steps for producing XTE filter files, starting from the original GO data received on tape or from the XTE Archive. An XTE filter file contains most of the housekeeping data deemed useful for creating Good Time Interval (GTI) files to filter unwanted events from XTE science data. See the section on filter files in The ABC of XTE for further information.

• The recipe below assumes that your data are in an unchanged xte proposal database structure. This means that you have a directory (usually named for your proposal number) under which you have an FMI file and a sub-directory for each ObsId (e.g., subdirectories:

     10001-01-01-00A
     10001-01-01-00
     10001-01-01-00Z
     10001-01-02-00A
     etc.
  

  If you do not have a proposal FMI file, or if you have deleted any of the other index files (FI*), acs, hexte or pca directories under your individual ObsIds directories, the xtefilt recipe will not work for your data! To find out how to remake an FMI file, see the Database Management recipe.

  Other directories (e.g., cal, etc.) are not necessary for filter-file production. In addition, if (for reasons of disk space) you have deleted any HEXTE, PCA, or other science data files, you may still safely produce filter files. If the hexte directory itself has been deleted, xtefilt may generate an error message (depending on the circumstances, the program may also crash, but most likely it will just go on to the next type of data, and leave HEXTE housekeeping information out of your filter file).

• The recipe below produces one filter file for a single XTE ObsId (i.e. one of the sub-directories in the proposal directory). Type fhelp xtefilt for further details.

• If you are creating a filter file from "realtime" XTE data (i.e., data obtained directly from the XTE SOF, or from the realtime data directory in the XTE anonymous FTP area), you will get warning messages about missing data. Realtime data do not have some of the attitude information and other pointing specifics contained in processed data. Additionally, the contents of realtime data depend heavily on what data the user requested or conditions of the observation.

  Filter files generated from realtime data will have some missing quantities, and, in some cases, might not be produced at all.

   xtefilt -s -c -a appidlist -o 12345-01-01-00 -p /data/P12345 -t 16.0