Post Production Archive

A set of Post Production activities were performed on the science run archive produced by ATICA:

• An 8-bit quality code (QUALCODE) was computed for each event.
  • The flight software marks pixel locations that appear in the on-board ``bad pixel list'' with the bias flag value 4095, and marks pixel locations where the bias has been corrupted (by a memory fault) by the bias flag value 4094. An event whose island contains either of these BIAS values has bit 0 in QUALCODE set.
  • A BIAS value of zero indicates that ATICA was unable to recover a bias for that location. Such events have bit 1 in QUALCODE set.
  • CCD pixels whose charge exceeds the dynamic range of the flight electronics end up with a DN value of 4095. Events whose central pixel have this value have bit 2 in QUALCODE set.
  For most analyses, events with non-zero quality codes should be ignored.
• The bias correction PHAS = PHAS - BIAS - OVRCLK is applied.
• The events that belong to each of the phase H tests are identified and are saved in files named by the TRW ID of the test. This is the most important step in Post Production since it segments the long science runs (the instrument's view of what happened) into TRW ID's (the scientist's view of what happened).
• The as-requested CMDB table was edited to reflect the tests that were actually performed, based on what was seen in the data stream and what was written in various logs at the XRCF, producing the beginning of an as-run CMDB table.

The FITS events lists that comprise the Post Production archive consist of the following binary table columns: TIME, DETX, DETY, CCD_ID, AMP_ID, EXPOSURE, PHAS, & QUALCODE.

The only filtering performed during Post Production was the extraction of a single segment of time around the test. These time boundaries were liberally chosen to include a few frames before and after the test - thus one can usually still see the rise of the light curve at the beginning of the test and the fall at the end. Analysis of Post Production data will typically require additional filtering by time, elimination of non-zero QUALCODES, grade filtering, etc.