The Real-Time Assessment and Quick-Look Analysis (RTA/QLA) system will be used by the staff of the Science Operations Center. It is intended to monitor the SWS instrument status, and to provide the opportunity for a quick assessment of the success or failure of observations. RTA/QLA will run on workstations connected to the SOC local area network and receive the downlink telemetry of ISO including additional information like uplinked commands and AOT identification from the Operational Data Server (ODS).
The RTA part of the system decomposes the incoming telemetry format, converts the extracted parameters into physically meaningful values and performs command verification, limit checking and monitoring of housekeeping and status parameters. The command verification and error messages will be logged in parallel.
The RTA system also provides the interface to QLA. The science part of the telemetry and additional information will be written into circular files which can hold up to half an hour of data. This feature allows QLA to fall back in time if very time consuming calculations are necessary and to speed up afterwards.
QLA analyzes the detector readout concerning spike rate and saturation and performs AC corrections and slope calculations. Calibration tables produced in off-line processing are used to correct for cross talk and to apply wavelength and flux calibration. Error messages are automatically logged.
For different AOTs and Calibration Observations QLA provides standard set-ups which will run automatically to produce the corresponding scientific output, at a quality level allowing the resident astronomer to judge the success of an observation. In addition the experienced user can evoke ``dormant modules'' for detailed analysis of science data in case of trouble shooting or own interest.
The ``QLA-Report'' which will be generated automatically at the end of each AOT will contain AOT information like AOT number and target coordinates and all error messages collected by RTA and QLA during this AOT. The QLA-Report will be used later on in Off-Line Processing and Interactive Analysis.
For detailed analysis in case of trouble shooting RTA/QLA can also be used off-line.
Figure 7.1: Off-line processing - flow diagram of the standard
product generation pipeline.