XMM-Newton-NEWS

XMM-Newton-NEWS #135, 05-Jun-2012

XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre at
ESA's European Space Astronomy Centre,
P.O. Box - Apdo. 78, 28691 Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain

SOC Home Page:	https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/
Helpdesk web interface:	https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/xmm-newton-helpdesk
Helpdesk email address:	xmmhelp@sciops.esa.int
News Mailing List:	https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/newsletter

Version 12.0 of the Science Analysis System (SAS) released

The XMM-Newton SAS team is pleased to announce the release of a new version of the SAS: SAS 12.0.

Binaries for diverse flavours of Linux and MacOs (both in 32- and 64-bit native versions) are available at:

http://xmm.esac.esa.int/sas/current/download

The main improvements of this release can be summarised as follows:

Introduction of a time variable boresight, for coping with the time dependency observed in the alignment of the axes of the optical and X-ray cameras to the star tracker.
Final establishment of the 2D-PSF as the default EPIC point spread function. This model reproduces more accurately the detailed shape of the PSF, including the spoke structures.
Release of the task "epspatialcti", to correct the EPIC-pn final event list for the pixel-to-pixel changes in the CCDs Charge Transfer Inefficiency.
Introduction of the task "catcorr", for cross correlation of detected sources with several catalogues (USNO-B, 2MASS and SDSS) with the aim of increasing the accuracy of coordinates.
Introduction of the task "epnoise", to remove soft X-ray noisy frames from EPIC-pn data, updating accordingly the exposure time.
Release of the task "heliocentriccorr" for determination of the heliocentric correction to be applied to the wavelength scale of RGS observations.
Upgrade of the OM task "omprep" and the OM processing chains so that the user can choose the source for attitude reconstruction.

We have produced for the first time a 64-bit SAS version for MacOs, adding to the suite of 64-bit Linux versions released with SAS 11. A Darwin 11.4 (Lion) MacOSX version is also included for the first time in this release.

For further details please visit the SAS Pages at:

http://xmm.esac.esa.int/sas

XMM-Newton Users Group:
Minutes of meeting and presentations available

The XMM-Newton Users Group met on the 19^th and 20^th of April 2012 at ESAC. The minutes were approved on the 27^th of May and are available, together with the presentations of the meeting, at:

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/users-group

Yours sincerely,
XMM-Newton SOC

XMM-Newton-NEWS

XMM-Newton-NEWS #135, 05-Jun-2012

Contents:

Version 12.0 of the Science Analysis System (SAS) released

XMM-Newton Users Group: Minutes of meeting and presentations available

XMM-Newton Users Group:
Minutes of meeting and presentations available