In this chapter a description is given for the analysis of XMM-Newton data sets obtained with the European Photon Imaging Camera (EPIC).
In § 4.1 the structure of the EPIC related observation data files (ODF) is discussed.
The EPIC products created by the SOC standard Pipeline processing are listed in § 4.2.
§ 4.3 explains in a rather technical way how an EPIC ODF can be re-processed up to the level of generating calibrated event lists. Such re-processing should be performed by the investigator if the calibration or the software has improved significantly between the time of the pipeline processing and the current time. While users may want to specify different time selections or different energy selections to those used in the pipeline, in general the SOC pipeline is the result of years of experience tuning the individual task parameters. Some of the analysis process described here are also synthesized in the SAS threads at:
http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/sas-threads
All following sections in this chapter assume that calibrated event lists exists (either from the pipeline or from a re-processing) and demonstrate how to create data products like images, spectra, rate-curves and source lists for further scientific analysis. A document describing the current status of EPIC calibration and data analysis is available from the calibration web portal (XMM-SOC-CAL-TN-0018 [11]). This document is continuously updated so it is recommended to check it with certain regularity.