William D. Pence, Alexander Antunes, Lawrence E. Brown, James Peachey, Annette Saunders (NASA/GSFC)
Reference URL: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov
Several major new software capabilities recently developed at High Energy Astronomy Science Archive Research Center are demonstrated here. The new release of CFITSIO (Pence et al, this conference) greatly increases the flexibility of users accessing astronomical data, e.g., by permitting access directly to URL's and by allowing data to be read/written to/from internal memory. Our new TCL plug-in (Brown et al., this conference) makes it possible to build network applets which use the HEASARC's FTOOLS to access and analyze data, presaging a new way of distributing analysis tools. Using both of these, the WASABI observation visualization tool was rapidly built by integrating existing tools and software.
Development of FTOOLS, XANADU and scheduling (Saunders et al., this conference) packages has continued with substantial new capabilities released. Porting of tools to the PC environments has continued. Many applications can now be run under Windows 98/NT as well as various flavors of Unix.