Introduction

The FTOOLS software project began in late 1991 (Pence, 1992) as part of a goal to standardize high energy astrophysics data sets to the FITS (Wells et al., 1981) format at NASA's HEASARC. The earliest releases of FTOOLS consisted of a collection of tools for creating, viewing, and manipulating data sets using the FITS format. Today, the FTOOLS software has grown into a collection of subpackages supporting not only generic manipulation of FITS formatted data, but also tools for data analysis of high energy astrophysics missions using the FITS standard such as ASCA, GRO, ROSAT and now XTE.

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