National Aeronautics and Space Administration

GINGA Software

General FITS file manipulation : The FTOOLS package, futils , provides a suite of programs that can be used to view and manipulate any of the GINGA archive files. To view the data particularly useful are the tasks fplot (to plot the data), fdump (to dump the data file content), fstruct and flcol (to get the structure and column name of the FITS files). Basic selection and column manipulation can be done using fselect (to select rows based on the result of a boolean expression), fcalc (to calculate values for new column based on arithmetic expression) and fstatistic (to compute standard statistical value on a column). Alternatively most of the operations (and more) mention above can be done using fv , the interactive FITS file viewer and editor.

Spectra and Lightcurves : Spectra and lightcurves can be analyzed using Xspec and Xronos respectively. Xspec is a general spectral fitting programs, providing a number of already made standard models. To use XSPEC with the GINGA archive files, it is necessary to extract from the archive a source and background spectrum and a response matrix.
The GINGA lightcurves can be used in any of the Xronos programs, each dedicated to a specific timing task.

First Reduction Files (FRF): There are no mission-specific software to extract scientific information (spectra, lightcurves) from the FRFs. However the FRFs can be viewed and manipulated using fplot and fsumrows . Fplot will allow one to display up to 8 rows of the 48 channel spectra from one of the LAC detectors. An example of the use of fplot is given here. Fsumrows will allow multiple spectra to be summed together. The same 8 rows in the previous example are summed and then displayed in fplot in this example.