XMM-Newton Data Center at MPE Introduction to EPIC MOS data

This page will give a short overview how to prepare and analyze your EPIC MOS data. In many ways this is similar to the descriptions given for the EPIC PN. The XMMSAS package provides many tasks that can be either used as direct line commands, as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), or inside a shell script (see " How to Write Shell Scripts"). The advantage of the direct line task is that it can be used in batch jobs. The disadvantage is that you have to type very long parameter lists and sometimes, e.g. in evselect, the default parameter settings are not very useful for normal users. The advantage of the GUIs is that they are easy to use, but they cannot be used in batch jobs. The shell scripts actually can be used as commands. In this way the parameter list can be reduced to a small number, depending how flexible you want to design the command and how often you want to edit the script file. The other advantage is that you can run these shell scripts in batch jobs. The disadvantage is that you always have to make sure to know for which shell the script is defined.

The page of this data preparation part will only give a quick overview how do some basic work with XMM data. More advanced tasks will be found in separate pages, such as: Spatial analysis, Spectral analysis, and Timing analysis.
These pages all focus on EPIN MOS data. The pages for the other instruments are given here:

EPIC PN,
Reflection Grating Spectrometer (RGS), and the
Optical Monitor (OM)

Public archive data are available at MPE and VILSPA. Please have a look at the Public Archive page to see which datasets are available.

© X-Ray Group at MPE (group)
last update:2008-01-11, editor of this page:Frank Haberl, Dirk Grupe