XMM-Newton ñ Software Status
Mission software for scientific analysis (SAS) close to fully functional and fairly robust. SAS is a EU development (SSC and ESA) with US GOF programmer support
The last release, SAS 5.3, was a major milestone with considerable improvements in speed, functionality and stability
SAS processed files are OGIP standard FITS and output is fully compatible with FITS based analysis tools
SAS is a standalone system with its own libraries and GUI, but calls on Ftools primitives.
There is a different breakdown of functions compared to CIAO and SAS does not, in general, support data analysis (e.g., spectral fitting, timing etc). SAS allows the users to reprocess the data themselves (it takes ~3 hours/per observation) to take adva