While a variety of analysis packages can be used for the following steps, the SAS was designed for the basic reduction and analysis of XMM-Newton data and will therefore be used here for demonstration purposes.
As ever, it is strongly recommended that you keep all reprocessed data in its own directory! All flavors of Hera place output files in whichever directory it is in when a task is called. Throughout this primer, it is assumed that the Pipleline Processed data are in the PPS directory, the ODF data (with upper case file names, and uncompressed) are in the directory ODF, the reprocessing and analysis is taking place in the PROC directory. At this point, it is assumed that you have downloaded the data from the HEASARC archive onto a Hera server, standard or anonymous Hera is running (see §4.2), and you have prepared the data for processing with cifbuild and odfingest (see § 6). Throughout this chapter, we will use the AB Dor dataset with ObsID 0134520301 available through links at the HEASARC archive.