High-speed Tap Pipeline

The high-speed tap (HST) pipeline acquired raw, complete CCD frames directly from the camera using a secondary data pathway that is available only on the ground. These frames were captured by the ACIS EGSE workstation and written to disk as FITS images. Software running on the ACIS EGSE processed these images to correct for bias and to extract events, producing FITS event lists. This process and the format of the high-speed tap event lists are described in Section 3.2.

The high-speed tap was used in all phases of ACIS calibration at the XRCF. An archive of event lists is maintained by the Calibration Group at the AXAF Science Center and is available on the web at http://hea-www.harvard.edu/acis/xrcf_archive/ .