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ASCA Information on the World Wide Web

--by Karen Smale, Mary Odell & Don Jennings, HSTX/GSFC

There's a new page on the WWW that contains links to helpful information about ASCA. Guest Observers should take a look at the URL /docs/asca/ascagof.html and discover what useful information is available. These pages are still under construction and we welcome comments and suggestions for helpful links and documents. Please e-mail Mary Odell at modell@athena.gsfc.nasa.gov or click on the Feedback button found on many of the pages.

General Information

The General Information section contains an overview of the ASCA Guest Observer Facility, including how to book the GOF and a listing of GOF staff (scientists, technical support, data processing and software support). It also contains e-mail addresses for the ASCA Help Desk.

News Updates

The News Updates contain information about ASCA operations and instrument status including things like telemetry loss times. A Current AO Status page lists useful information about the deadline for proposals for the next AO and how to get the appendices. Calibration Uncertainties and a Software News page will keep you informed about the latest developments, software releases and bug reports. Check out on-line copies of the ASCANews under this section if you'd like to see color images in the ASCA Gallery.

ASCA Mission and Proposal Information

This area of the WWW pages should be of great interest to the ASCA Observer. These pages contain the current approved observing program, daily mission reports from ISAS in the form of PostScript files which can be extracted and printed, and ASCA long-term and short-term Timelines.

In addition, access to the processing log from the ASCA Data Center is provided, allowing guest observers, ASCA GOF members and the general scientific community to find out the status of ASCA observations. Users are given three methods of access to the processing logs. The first method allows the user to look up information by object name. Lists of observed ASCA targets, broken down by general type, may be scanned or the names of specific objects may be entered into a search utility for automatic scanning. The second access method is by observer name. This allows observers with proprietary data to check on the status of their particular ASCA observations. The third access method is by ASCA sequence number. Here too, lists of ASCA sequences may be either manually or automatically searched for specific sequences. To quickly access the processing information, the ASCA Data Center home page can be found at http://adfwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/asca/ascaDF.html.

Links to the HEASARC Browse facility are available from this area. Mosaic users with forms capabilities can search the ASCA and other databases by name or coordinate searches.

Images of the satellite, launch and individual instruments are also available from this section.

Mission Planning Tools

A guide to planning ASCA observations is available under Mission Planning Tools. Users with forms capabilities can also run the program Viewing (see Legacy, 3, 21) and a program that determines the angle between a target and the sun on a given date.
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