29th Annual Report (2016-17)

The ASSC has been equipped with the state-of-the-art computing and data storage facilities. There are six, all-in-one desktop computers, two high end laptops and a Dell workstation 7910, equipped with 8TB disk space, 250GB RAM and 14 Intel Xeon Processors E5-2690 CPUs. The workstation is equipped with the pipeline software and calibration database for AstroSat instruments and other major X-ray astronomy software. TheASSC has hired one post-doctoral fellow and two software engineers. TheASSC web portal maintains up-to-date information and online tools to help users propose forAstroSat observations and to analyze the data. For proposers, it has the announcements of opportunities, proposal templates, online tools, such as exposure time and visibility calculators, data simulation codes and necessary documents such as the proposers' guide and AstroSat Handbook. For data analyzers, the latest available pipelines for all four instruments are maintained including sample data, which allows the user to actually try out the analysis. The results of the analysis of the sample data are made available allowing the new user to evaluate whether his/her analysis matches with the standard ones or not. Additional important software, such as theAstroSat orbit file generator, the Barycentric correction code and theAstroSat time converter, have been developed in-house at theASSC, and are made available through the portal. ASSC has also developed advanced resources like software to compute frequency and energy dependent time lag from LAXPC data. The portal has links to other relevant resources, such as the GHATS timing package. The portal presents recent updates and news as well as the currently availableAstroSat's schedule of observations. AstroSat is a multi-wavelength astrophysics observatory for a large scientific community. The five payloads onboard have different scientific capabilities and technical constraints. The peer-reviewed, scientific proposal-driven operation is an intricate and a challenging process. To facilitate the proposal-driven operation of the AstroSat mission, a web-based proposal processing software known as the “AstroSat Proposal Processing System" (APPS) has been designed and developed by IUCAA in collaboration with Persistent Systems Limited (PSL), Pune. APPS assists scientists in proposal preparation, submission, scientific and technical review and selection process. It caters to different types of users, including the general or guest observers, payload operation centre team members, payload scientists and proposal reviewers. It can validate submitted proposals including syntax checking, parameter ranges and proposal completeness, thus, allowing proposers to detect errors. APPS provides a complete and flexible interface for the users to specify instrument configurations appropriate to their science requirements. It also allows proposers to revise proposals with changes in requested observing time, number of targets to instrument configuration as per recommendations of the technical and/or scientific peer-review processes. APPS also extracts important proposal information including the instrument configuration, which is used for mission planning and scheduling of observations. APPS is currently deployed at the Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC), ISRO, Bengaluru. It has been successfully used for proposal preparation, submission and selection for observations in the (i) Performance verification (PV) phase in the first sixmonth of AstroSat operations, (ii) First, second and third Guaranteed Time (GT) cycles, (iii) First and second Announcement of Opportunity (AO) cycles, Target of Opportunity and Calibration proposals. IUCAAhas played a crucial role in quick fix of bugs and security issues, addition of new features as per the requirement, documentation, and feature enhancement. IUCAA has also provided time-critical support on administrative activities, including proposal cycle creation, setting instrument configuration, handling proposal review during the GT cycle and revision of proposals, verifying and fixing issues with the mission control and proposals database (MCAP), which is used for mission planning, scheduling of observation and command generation. IUCAA has also provided support to the proposers including those from payload science teams on GT proposals, payload operation centres on CAL proposals, and guest observers on AO proposals. Further, IUCAA has prepared the AstroSat Proposers guide, and proposal preparation tools, such as the multi-instrument spectral simulator, AstroSat PIMMS, etc. All the proposal preparation tools, instrument responses and background files as well as documents have beenmade available at theASSCwebsite. ASSCWeb Portal and Software Development TheAstroSat Proposal Processing System (APPS) 125