Fred A. Jansen, Marco Beijersbergen, Jon Brumfit, Uwe Lammers, Hassan Siddiqui, Mark Thomas, Giuseppe Vacanti, Peter Videler (European Space Agency)
Reference URL: http://astro.estec.esa.nl/XMM
The X-ray Multi-mirror Mission XMM, is the next cornerstone to be launched in the Horizon 2000 program of the European Space Agency. In preparation for the use of the scientific data produced by this observatory by the astronomical community, several data analysis tools are being prepared. The interactive data analysis software which is currently being written, reuses all components of the software pipeline which will routinely process XMM observations. The re-use of this (non-interactive) software is enabled by a wraparound graphical user interface. This paper will describe the development status and the design of the system (written in C++/F90) and its data abstraction layers, which have been designed in such a way that an end-user can easy add their own modules to the system.