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The data package received by the investigator contains EPIC pn and EPIC MOS calibrated event lists generated by the SOC pipeline processing. As the SOC 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. However, investigators may consider reprocessing their data to get full advantage from the latest developments of software and/or calibration. In the case of EPIC, reprocessing can be accomplished by running the default pipeline processing meta tasks emproc and epproc (also known as epicproc) or the chain tasks emchain and epchain for EPIC MOS and pn respectively. The chain 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 the chain tasks are scripts, they can easily be edited, allowing 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 (it is assumed that cifbuild and odfingest have already been run; see § 2.3),
setenv SAS_CCF /my_work/ccf.cif setenv SAS_ODF /my_work/<odf_name>SUM.SAS 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.
For emproc and epproc, 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.
emproc and epproc create 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:
Depending on the pipeline setup, some of the files above may not be produced. The default emproc/epproc setting produces only AttHk, Badpixels and event files. All the pipeline processing tasks inside the proc meta tasks can also be run individually by the user.