The SPIRE Photometer Interactive Analysis Package SPIA

TL;DR

The paper introduces SPIA, an interactive analysis package for the Herschel SPIRE instrument, enabling flexible, GUI-based data reduction and analysis beyond rigid pipelines, improving user control and understanding.

Contribution

It presents the development and validation of SPIA, a GUI-based, interactive analysis tool that enhances data processing flexibility for the Herschel SPIRE instrument.

Findings

SPIA effectively breaks down pipeline reduction into logical components.

SPIA provides user-friendly access to processing parameters via GUIs.

Validation demonstrates SPIA's utility for flexible data analysis.

Abstract

The Herschel Common Science System (HCSS) (Ott et al. 2006) (Ott & Science Ground Segment Consortium 2010) is a substantial Java software package, accompanying the development of the Herschel Mission (Pilbratt et al. 2010), supporting all of its phases. In particular the reduction of data from the scientific instruments for instrument checkout, calibration, and astronomical analysis is one of its major applications. The data reduction software is split up in modules, called "tasks". Agreed-upon sequences of tasks form pipelines that deliver well defined standard products for storage in a web-accessible Herschel Science Archive (HSA) (Leon et al. 2009). However, as astronomers and instrument scientists continue to characterize instrumental effects, astronomers already need to publish scientific results and may not have the time to acquire a sufficiently deep understanding of the system to apply necessary fixes. There is a need for intermediate level analysis tools that offer more flexibility than rigid pipelines. The task framework within the HCSS and the highly versatile Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE), together with the rich set of libraries provide the necessary tools to develop GUI-based interactive analysis packages for the Herschel instruments. The SPIRE Photometer Interactive Analysis (SPIA) package, that was demonstrated in this session, proves the validity of the concept for the SPIRE instrument (Griffin et al. 2010), breaking up the pipeline reduction into logical components, making all relevant processing parameters available in GUIs, and providing a more controlled and user-friendly access to the complexities of the system.