History

The first version of XSPEC was written in 1983 at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, under VAX/VMS by Rick Shafer. It was written to perform spectral analysis of data from the ESA EXOSAT X-ray observatory, which was launched that year. XSPEC is a descendant of a series of spectral-fitting programs written at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center for the OSO-8, HEAO-1 and EO missions. The initial design was the fruit of many discussions between Rick Shafer and Andy Szymkowiak.

Rick Shafer subsequently joined the EXOSAT group, where he enhanced the VAX/VMS version in collaboration with Frank Haberl. Meanwhile, Keith Arnaud ported XSPEC to a Sun/UNIX operating system. The two implementations of XSPEC diverged for several years until a determined and coordinated effort was made to recover a single version. The results of that effort was XSPECv6, described in the first edition of this manual. Subsequent editions have covered later versions of the program.

An extensive re-engineering effort was started in the fall of 1998 to improve long-term maintainability, allow significant new features to be added, and support the analysis of spectra from coded-mask instruments.

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Last modified: Friday, 23-Aug-2024 13:20:40 EDT

HEASARC Staff Scientist Position - Applications are now being accepted for a Staff Scientist with significant experience and interest in the technical aspects of astrophysics research, to work in the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD. Refer to the AAS Job register for full details.