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Status Software Versions (used in current pipelines) HEADAS 6.0.4 CIAO 3.3 CIAO Caldb 3.2.0 XMM-SAS 6.5.0 XAssist 0.93 Upcoming X-ray Astronomy Deadlines Email Updates Sign up here fore a very low traffic informal email list for updates. Email address:

Pipelines Pipeline Reports Source List Chandra v3 Field List master_srclist.csv XMM-Newton v3 Field List master_srclist.csv XMM-Newton v2 (no longer active) Field List master_srclist.csv ROSAT HRI Field List master_srclist.csv News 5/9/08 - Version 0.96 is available in the Downloads section. We are also transitioning to more advanced web site, which is currently at http://xassist.pha.jhu.edu/zope/xassist. The documentation here and in the xassist tar ball is a bit out of date, and there is some more recent documentation on the new site. 4/2/08 - We are performing final testing of the latest version of XAssist and it will be released shortly. 12/10/07 - A new version of XAssist will be released at the end of this year that will include support for Suzaku data analysis. There will be versions for Linux and Mac OSX. 9/27/07 - A disk holding "raw" data (i.e., downloaded from the archives) crashed. At the time XAssist was being re-run on fields to bring them up to the most recent version of XAssist to introduce the improved web interface, and some of these are now listed as being stopped at "acquire" since the data were not found. As the data are re-downloaded these fields will be re-run again. In the case of some Chandra fields newer data has apparently resulted in a shift in pixel positions requiring the fields to be completely re-run. In general all of this should have no noticeable impact on source lists, except for some cases where completely re-running the processing may have resulted in some renumbering of the sources lists (since the source list is sorted by the count rate coming from the detection stage which may be slightly different with more recent versions of the raw data). 7/25/07 - The search functionality is now working again. The main advantage of using it over searching via HEASARC is that direct links to spectral fits files are returned (if they exist for the source). 6/5/07 - The current xmm and chandra pipelines were run or reprocessed with XAssist v.934 or v0.937 (where no changes between v0.934 and v0.937 affected the source lists), ciao v3.3, cxc caldb v3.2.1, and xmmsas v6.5.0. The latest version of xassist (v0.94) introduces a better web interface and will be run on these pipelines. This also should not change the source list data. 5/15/06 - New AISR funding has recently been awarded to update XAssist and introduce web services access for use with the Virtual Observatory. 2/2/06 - The current version of XAssist (0.93) works with XMM SAS 6.5.0, however it may have to be restarted (it often exits at the source detection stage). 12/08/05 - The main XAssist site was down last week due to a hardware failure. We are currently updating the code to work with ciao 3.3 and a new release should be available by the end of the year. 08/23/05 - The XAssist XMM and Chandra pipelines are now tables that are updated weekly at HEASARC (see XMMXASSIST and CXOXASSIST). 06/20/05 - XAssist v0.92 is available for download. It contains significant bug fixes although mostly to do with efficiency, although an important change is that now it is necessary to download bias files from the CXC since they are required for use by mkacisrmf. This version still runs psextract which calls mkrmf, however acis_process_events uses a gain file appropriate for mkacisrmf and not mkrmf. Any field processed with previous versions of XAssist and ciao 3.2 should be reprocessed. Also note that when processing xmm data, it may be necessary to re-run XAssist from the beginning (i.e., by deleting the .xassist directory) in order for it to pick up the epchain and emchain products. 12/16/04 - There were some complications in simply upgrading ciao and xmm-sas. The pipelines will be restarted after these issues are worked out (along with a new release of XAssist). 12/15/04 - The XMM and Chandra pipelines (version 3) are being re-run with the current fields lists but latest versions of the software (XAssist v0.915, ciao 3.1, caldb 2.29, xmm-sas 6.1.0) to homogenize the database in terms of calibration and processing. In the future fields will be added to a given version of a pipeline if any changes in the processing are only cosmetic. 08/30/04 - Latest version should work OK with XMM-SAS v. 6.0. The K-S test is still flaky so the temporal analysis step is being skipped in all pipeline processing. 08/12/04 - Updated xspec tcl scripts are available (main change is update to smart_fit.tcl to work with xspec 11.3). 01/27/04 - The current version of XAssist works with the latest CIAO after configuring CIAO with the gzip option. If you are running XAssist and it appears to hang (i.e., nothing shows up while running "top"), see the Hints section of the manual. (Very) old news

Copyright (c) 2001-2003 Johns Hopkins University All Rights Reserved. This work acknowledges the support of NASA of the U.S. Government.