From: Conor A Nixon
Date: April 5, 2007 11:34:00 AM PDT
To: Mitch Gordon
Cc: Mark Showalter
Subject: Re: telecon information - peer review of re-formatted CIRS data
Mitch and Mark,
I have now had the opportunity to browse the new archive, and it all
looks very good. I have not however had the opportunity to do any
detailed validation of the spectral data versus the current archive - I
presume that there are others doing this? Some comments and thoughts
follow, and I look forward to speaking with you on Tuesday.
regards
Conor Nixon
PS - I am on vacation tomorrow, back Monday.
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Comments On The Re-Formatted CIRS Data Archive (Peer Review)
by Conor A. Nixon, Univ. MD. 04/05/07.
Overall, my impression of the re-formatted CIRS Data Archive was
extremely positive: I commend the re-formatters on an excellent job. In
particular, I was impressed by the LBL files which now contain much more
information than previously.
A few comments:
1) REF.CAT: this is very far out of date. CIRS normally provides a file
now called CIRSREF.CAT which is (almost) current. I will work on
updating it.
We will update these files based on the corresponding COCIRS_0xxx files.
2) My second comment was going to be about the file naming convention: I
was expecting that the re-formatted data, which adheres to Cassini
observation boundaries, would therefore use the request name as part of
the file name. However, I see that that the request name is included in
the .LBL file as "OBSERVATION_ID" and I understand that custom PDS
software is under development for browsing the CIRS dataset, so maybe it
doesn't matter so much.
OK. Consensus is not to change this. Our on-line catalog (in development) will make it easier to locate files based on the CIMS request. The user can also search the index files for this purpose.
3) The minute part of the file name does not exactly correspond to the
minute of the time of the first data item in the file. This is probably
known to the data producers judging by the reference to "approximate
minute" in the tutorial.txt file. Examples of such instances are
ISPM0505280401_FP3.TAB which starts at 04:02:04 and
ISPM05050311800_FP1.TAB which starts at 18:01:04. This is hardly a major
problem but I was curious as to why the difference exists.
The minute is the start time of the observation. Otherwise, files from different focal planes of the same CIMS request sometimes turned out to have different time tags, which was very confusing. We will clarify this in TUTORIAL.TXT and DATAINFO.TXT.
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Conor A. Nixon
Univ. Maryland /NASA GSFC
-+-
Solar System Exploration Division
Planetary Systems Lab -Code 693
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
tel. 301-xxx-xxxx
fax. 301-xxx-xxxx