The data package received by the investigator contains EPIC pn and EPIC MOS calibrated event lists generated by the SSC pipeline processing. As the SSC pipeline is the result of years of experience tuning the individual task parameters, in general no re-processing is needed. The script of the pipeline processing (SCRCLOG) is made available to the investigator to check how the pipeline processing created EPIC products. Only if the calibration has improved significantly between the time of the pipeline processing and the current time, the investigator should reprocess the EPIC data by running the default pipeline processing meta tasks emproc and epproc (also known as epicproc) or the chain tasks emchain and epchain. These tasks run the calibration part of the EPIC MOS and pn pipelines in their simplest form processing all ODF components without any interaction from the user and creating calibrated EPIC event lists. As these tasks are scripts they can easily be edited and they allow to produce several additional output files (mainly for diagnostic purposes). The processing tasks are run by specifying the path to the ODF directory and applying the following task commands
setenv SAS_CCF <path>/ccf.cif setenv SAS_ODF <path>/odf emproc / emchainor/and
epproc / epchain
Input files are looked for in the directory entered via the SAS_ODF environment variable, which must also contain the general ODF files (attitude, time, summary file). Output files are created in the current directory.
At the beginning of the epicproc meta tasks, the task atthkgen creates an attitude history file, which will be used by attcalc.
The withinstexpids and selectccds parameters allow to run epicproc on a subset of the data files (select a single exposure, a single instrument or a single CCD). The processing of timing modes for cases in which the pointing is offset with respect to the source, requires that the user specifies the additional parameters withsrccoords, srcra, and srcdec. For pn optionally one can use timingsrcposition in RAWY coordinates. In most other cases the default values are adequate.
The pipeline processing creates in the current directory output data sets with the following naming convention:
Every output file name starts with a string composed by one or more of the following parts, each separated by an underscore character (_):
These parts are hierarchically structured, so that, say, any data set name that contains the exposure identifier will also contain the revolution number, the observation identifier, and the instrument name.
Additional strings indicate the contents of the data set:
All the pipeline processing tasks inside the proc meta tasks can also be run individually by the user.