Suzaku News #053: ISIS tools/Budget review results

[suzakunews@lists.nasa.gov]

[1] ISIS tools for bright point sources
[2] (US) Results of Stage 2 reveiew and revised budget

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[1] ISIS tools for bright point sources

				    By Dr. Michael Nowak, MIT

The MIT-Chandra X-ray Science Center (CXC)/Software Data Systems (SDS)  
group has created two tools that might be useful for the analysis of  
Suzaku XIS data, especially for bright sources.  The first tool,  
aeattcor.sl, uses measurements of the time-dependent positions of an  
XIS image to create an improved Suzaku attitude file for observations  
of moderately bright to bright sources.  This new attitude file can be  
applied to the XIS event file to further reduce image blur, and it can  
be used with the standard ARF generation tools.  The second tool,  
pile_estimate.sl, reads a Suzaku event file to obtain estimates of the  
degree of pileup present as a function of position within an XIS  
image.  The tool first creates and displays an event file lightcurve  
and/or a color-color/color-intensity diagram.  These plots can be used  
interactively to create a time filter to select periods of relatively  
uniform count rate and color.  The DS9 image tool is then used to  
display a "pileup map" of the time-filtered image.  The user can then  
create a region filter that excludes the central, most piled regions.   
Both the time filter and region filter are saved to files suitable for  
use with standard Suzaku data processing tools.  Both tools are  
written as S-lang scripts, to be run via the Interactive Spectral  
Interpretation System (ISIS) data analysis platform.  The tool web  
pages provide a complete list of software dependencies, links to the  
software download pages, examples of the tools' use, and caveats for  
their use.  The scripts can be easily modified for custom use, and the  
scripts' authors will take feedback and suggestions for future script  
enhancements.

For furtehr details see  http://space.mit.edu/ASC/software/suzaku .

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[2] (US) Results of Stage 2 reveiew and revised budget

Cycle 3/Stage 2 (budget) proposals for US-based researchers have been
reviewed and funding decisions made.  The award letters were mailed out
(in hardcopy form, via US mail) on August 8, 2008.  

In many cases, the approved amounts are less than 80% of the proposed
amounts, requiring that PIs submit a revised budget.  We encourage
affected PIs to do so within 2 weeks of the receipt of the official
award letter, although we have not set a formal deadline.  Procedures
can be found at:

  http://suzaku.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/prop_tools/stage2/budgetrev_c3.html