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J. K. Blackburn
NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center, Code 664.0, Greenbelt,
MD 20771
Hughes STX Corporation, 4400 Forbes Blvd., Lanham, MD 20706 HEASARC
The FTOOLS software project began in late 1991 (Pence 1992) as part of a goal to standardize high energy astrophysics data sets to the FITS (Wells et al. 1981) format at NASA's HEASARC. The earliest releases of FTOOLS consisted of a collection of tools for creating, viewing, and manipulating data sets using the FITS format. Today, the FTOOLS software has grown into a collection of subpackages supporting not only generic manipulation of FITS formatted data, but also tools for data analysis of high energy astrophysics missions using the FITS standard such as ASCA, GRO, ROSAT, and now XTE.
In the design of the FTOOLS, portability was given the highest
consideration. The software specifications called for ANSI FORTRAN and
C as the base languages. To bind the differences in these languages
between supported architectures, the C macro package CFORTRAN develop
by Burkhard Burows and distributed by CERN is used. The FTOOLS design
also required a common user interface in the three most popular
environments used by the astronomical community today, UNIX, VMS and
IRAF. Under UNIX and VMS, the FTOOLS are referred to as stand-alone or
``Host'' to distinguish this environment from IRAF. However, the user
interface to the FTOOLS is identical in all environments. To achieve
this cross environment support, a user interface based on the IRAF
parameter file was adapted. This particular interface provides for
command line assignment of any or all parameters, range checking,
defaults and user prompts. By isolating the interface to the data and
parameter files files to standardized subroutines common to all
environments, the differences in making FTOOLS for UNIX, VMS and IRAF
are resolved by linking to the appropriate libraries such as IRAF or
the stand-alone XPI parameter interface. This is illustrated to the
left in Figure 
.
Figure: FTOOLS Task and Package Design.
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The FTOOLS software package is layered into a collection of
subpackages supporting a generic (or core) set of tools and a
collection of subpackages for specific missions in high energy
astrophysics. These subpackages are layered over the necessary
libraries and environments that the FTOOLS build under. This is
illustrated to the right in Figure . By having this
layering, additional subpackages supporting new missions or even the
particular needs of an individual user or project can easily be
plugged into the FTOOLS package with minimal edits to underlying
layers.
On-line help is available for each of the tasks distributed with the FTOOLS. Under IRAF, help is obtained just as with any other IRAF task. Under the stand-alone Host FTOOLS, a specialized FTOOL named fhelp is used to access the on-line help database. In both cases, simply follow the appropriate help command with the name of the FTOOLS task. The on-line help presented provides a usage, description, list of options (through the parameters) and examples.
As an example of the use of the FTOOLS, consider a FITS data set of photon events from an supernova remnant made by an X-ray imaging telescope which has within its field of view a calibration source. First the structure of the FITS dataset needs to be determined. This is accomplished with the fstruct task. Using the Host FTOOLS this would look like
ftools.gsfc.nasa.gov kent[1] % fstruct raw.evt No. Type EXTNAME BITPIX Dimensions(columns) PCOUNT GCOUNT 0 PRIMARY 32 0 0 1 1 BINTABLE EVENTS 8 30(12) 55753 0 1 2 BINTABLE STDGTI 8 16(2) 139 0 1
From this it is determined that the photon events are located in the first extension, which is a FITS binary table extension with 55753 rows (events). Now determine the format of the table using the flcol task to list the names of the columns
ftools.gsfc.nasa.gov kent[2] % flcol raw.evt+1
___Column_Names_________Formats__________Units___
TIME 1D s
X 1I pixel
Y 1I pixel
PHA 1I channel
PI 1I channel
RISE_TIME 1I
There are several columns in this data set. Using the X and Y columns,
basic statistics can be learned about these columns with the
fstatistic task or an image can be built up from the photon list
using the f2dhisto. Using the PHA column and the fhisto
task a quick-look spectrum can be made and viewed with fplot
(see spectrum to the left in Figure ).
Figure: Raw spectrum on left showing supernova remnant with
calibration source and the spatially filtered spectrum to right.
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Now through the use of these FTOOLS tasks one determines that the
supernova remnant is centered at (114,129) in the pixel space of the
image with a radius of 40 pixels. Using the fselect task to
select out only the photons associated with the supernova and the
background and then the fhisto task on the resulting supernova
events, the spectrum on the right in Figure having no
calibration peak is binned and then viewed.
ftools.gsfc.nasa.gov kent[3] % fselect raw.evt+1 snova.evt Name of output FITS file[] snova.evt Selection Expression[] sqrt((X-114)**2 + (Y-129)**2) < 40 ftools.gsfc.nasa.gov kent[4] % fhisto snova.evt+1 spec.fits PHA 1
The FTOOLS distribution comes complete with a User's Guide which has a short tutorial going into more detail about using FTOOLS. Other references discussing FTOOLS are found in Blackburn & Pence (1994). The IRAF documentation are also available to learn more on the FTOOLS software package.
The FTOOLS software package is available to the public with access to the Internet. It is distributed as a compressed tar file through anonymous ftp from legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov. In the directory software/ftools/release you will find the a README file, release notes, source code, reference data for ASCA data analysis, and documentation covering the installation, usage, and development of the FTOOLS software. Further information on the FTOOLS can be found on the World Wide Web at the FTOOLS Home Page.
I am grateful to all the members of the FTOOLS group at the HEASARC for the effort they have made in bringing together under one paradigm, a significant and useful astronomical software package.
Wells, D. C., Greisen, E. W., & Harten, R. H. 1981, A&AS, 44, 371
Blackburn, J. K., & Pence, W. 1994, Legacy - The Journal of the HEASARC, 4, 5
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