6.3 Specialised Analysis Tools

These can be best discussed in terms of subject area:

Solar Physics: Along with the data, the user community needs access to basic data processing and calibration procedures, and the analysis codes associated with each data set or mission. Much of this is currently available through the SolarSoft facility. In addition a large amount of mission-specific software exists which should be associated with the relevant data archive. Many data access and visualisation tools for solar physics are currently under investigation as part of the EGSO project funded by the European Commission. The automated techniques for the solar feature recognition developed in the EGSO project are generic pattern recognition techniques that have been tested on photographs, CCTV images and solar images for detection of sunspots, active regions and filaments. Some of these techniques, with modifications, can be applied to many other solar and planetary features, while for some specific features, like waves or fast intensity variations, the other pattern recognition techniques have to be developed. It is envisaged that the UKSSVO would develop a list of solar and planetary features to be catalogued as well as to include the tools developed for their recognition into the specialised analysis tool.

Planetary Physics: Two existing packages are widely used by the planetary science community: VICAR from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ISIS from the United States Geological Survey. These packages are already to some extent inter-compatible, capable of reading each other's image headers and using the standard Planetary Data System (PDS) for labelling files. Typical tasks for these packages would be to combine multiple images, to correct images geometrically and radiometrically, to identify features by threshold detection, to measure cloud velocities in planetary atmospheres and to handle different kinds of map projection. These capabilities should be made available within the Virtual Observatory, either by download or through appropriate user interfaces. Further specific software needed by the planetary community, which should be developed within the Virtual Observatory, includes the ability to access spacecraft ephemeris and pointing data and feature recognition software for planetary images, either using scale-independent comparison techniques or referencing images to topographic models.

STP/Interplanetary: Because there is a much greater diversity of instruments, there are fewer standard software tools. One package that is applicable to multiple data sets is the Queen Mary Science Analysis System (QSAS), developed by the UK Cluster Science Centre to support the analysis of multi-spacecraft data. The new version of this tool includes extended capabilities for handling higher-level data products such as spectrograms and particle distributions. Elsewhere, high-level analysis software tends to be instrument- specific (e.g. for radars such as EISCAT and SuperDARN), while other software (e.g. current sheet detection for magnetometers) can be applied to networks of instruments. While it would not be appropriate to make data analysis software for every instrument accessible within the UKSSVO, the Virtual Observatory might include the capability to initiate standard analyses for the most widely used instruments.