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1) REF.CAT: this is very far out of date.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