Software for RAPID Data
This page gives a brief overview of the RAPID Software.
Raw data
The RAPID software operates on the raw data (level 1) files known as
MSF or Merged Science Files, which are nothing more than the
original raw data from ESOC packed in a more convenient form.
The MSF files can be obtained for the entire mission from MPS, as described
in the installation manual.
SCI Files
Processed data, containing particle fluxes, count rates, housekeeping information,
etc, are generated from the MSF files by means of the analysis program
msf2sci (which is really only one function contained in the all-purpose
generalized program named gcdc_pmgr).
This code is written in Fortran-77 with some C modules. The source files are
available to authorized RAPID users. The software runs under VMS, Windows, Unix(Sun), and
Linux. Ready-to-run executables are provided for some of these platforms.
The processing requires various suppport (or system) files, such as calibration files,
caveat files, production control files.
These support files must be regularly updated,
especially for processing the latest data. They must be updated more regularly
than the software itself.
The processed data are written to SCI files (science files), one per
original product. These are written in an ascii format specific to the RAPID.
Users were originally expected to write their own software to read SCI files and
to analyse and plot the data. Many users have indeed done this. We do now provide
and IDL tool to do this (see below).
Cluster Active Archive and CEF files
For the Cluster Active Archive, the RAPID
data are converted from the SCI files to the CEF, Cluster Exchange Format
the universal format as used by all other Cluster instruments for archiving. (This can
be readily converted to CDF, the Common Data Format
maintained by GSFC.)
We provide a software package to convert SCI to CEF (sci2caa) but this
is at the moment really intende only for use by CAA. (This may change once things
are functioning routinely.)
RAPID Visualizing Software
An IDL program is now available to plot the RAPID data, either from SCI or CEF
files. It is part of the RAPID contribution to CAA
and can be obtained from there.
The most recent version is available from MPS.
Obtaining Software from MPS
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