Proposal utilities; extractor bugs

[Ascanews Account <MUKAI@lheavx.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

	1. Another deadline reminder
	2. Tools for proposal preparation
	3. Bugs in extractor.

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1. Another reminder
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ASCA proposal deadline is Wed, Aug 13th --- only ~3 weeks left!

(We mistakenly said "Thursday, Aug 13th" in a previous message;
we meant "Wednesday, Aug 13th".  We apologize for any confusions
this may have caused.)

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2. Tools
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We are pleased to announce the availability of WebSpec

	http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/webspec/webspec.html

WebSpec is a WWW interface for the X-ray spectral fitting package, XSPEC,
for the purpose of simulating spectral data for ASCA and XTE instruments.
WebSpec does not have everything that xspec has; however, our intention is
that any spectral simulations necessary to write a proposal should be possible
within WebSpec.  Please try it out and let us know.

We have also released a new version (2.4) of PIMMS, and PIMMS now has
its own home-page:

	http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/tools/pimms.html

We have updated the ASCA SIS specific outputs of PIMMS; however, this
only relates to the telemetry saturation problem (due to hot/flickering
pixels), and not in the count rates predicted.  If you have worked on
the feasibility of a proposal using the old version (2.3), you do not
have to obtain v2.4 and re-calculate the feasibility.

The WWW interface to PIMMS, W3pimms at:

	http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/Tools/w3pimms.html

will be updated to use the new version shortly.

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3. Bugs in xselect/extractor.
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The following has recently been posted on our web-site:

	http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/asca/soft_ascabug.html

* The xselect 'filter phase' command does not work under Solaris and does not
work under other systems unless other time filtering is also being performed.
The problem is actually in the extractor ftool.  The fix is to replace
xselect/extractor/times.f and xselect/extractor/exwin.inc with those in
	ftp://lheaftp.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/kaa/ftools
and rebuild extractor. 

* The output value of the MJD-OBS keyword is incorrect.  This causes timeconv
to fail.  We are not aware of any other consequences.  A workaround for an
individual file is to get the values of TSTART and MJDREF then use fparkey 
to set MJD-OBS to the value of TSTART/86400+MJDREF.  Note that if you ran
timeconv with extrapolate=yes then you need to remake the event file.
The permanent fix is to replace xselect/extractor/wstdky.f with the one found
in the directory mentioned above and rebuild extractor.