Future

A large number of nearly invisible changes are being made in order to remain “SAS-compliant”. For example, reliance on cfitsio, ftools, and other HEASoft based tools is being phased out. SAS is also phasing out Perl routines in favour of Python, so ESAS no longer has any Perl routines. The arrival of Python will mean the final retirement of QDP from ESAS.

Improvements to the creation of the quiescent particle background spectra for the MOS are being developed (Kuntz & Snowden in prep) and substantial improvements are being implemented for the pn. Those improvements will appear in the next release of SAS. They will incorporate information about space weather to determine whether the calculated QPB is sufficient.

Table 4: Future Modifications

SAS	Task	Change
Future	espfilt	Tweak the histogram fitting algorithm to avoid some exceptional cases that have time intervals without counts
$-$	espfilt	More careful implementation of MOS small window mode selections
$-$	espfilt	Auto-remove time intervals with zero counts (due to data gap) to allow merged event files to be used
$-$	emlfill	Fix!
$-$	mosspectra & pnspectra	Better implementation of keepinterfiles
$-$	mosspectra & pnspectra	New QPB implementation
$-$	mosspectra & pnspectra	ensure the ability to use MASK(filename)
$-$	mosback	Automatic call to rotdet2sky for background image
$-$	mosback	rationalization of diagnostic plots, elimination of QDP
$-$	pnback	Automatic call to rotdet2sky for background image
$-$	pnback	rationalization of diagnostic plots, elimination of QDP
$-$	proton	Automatic call to rotdet2sky for background image
$-$	swcx	Automatic call to rotdet2sky for background image
$-$	swcx	Implementation of more SWCX lines
$-$	combimage	User specified scale factors
$-$	adapt	Produce uncertainty image, better diagnostic plots
$-$	overlap	New task to determine the offsets between overlapping images
$-$	mosaicmerge	Capability for larger mosaics?
$-$	weather	Build space weather data for a given observation
$-$	gtiedit	GUI editor for editting gti files
$-$	check_orbit	Fix for future use with MOS2 or pn
$-$	convregion	Implement boxes
$-$	TBD	A routine to calculate the maximal region that allows coverage by all three detectors. This would be useful if one needed exactly the same sky region from each detector.
$-$	general	determine action from MOS1-2 edge issue
$-$	TBD	A routine to apply pn GTI to MOS exposures properly
$-$	protonscale	Change name to getbackscale