XMM-Newton Trainee Project 2004

Diego Aguado

My name is Diego Aguado. I was born in Madrid in 1979. I studied the degree in Mathematics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, plus one year in Liverpool. I entered the ESA Trainee program as part of my final year of studies. During my six-month training period at Vilspa I carried out a project under the supervision of my tutor Marcus Kirsch for refinement of the EPIC count rate estimation in PHS tools.

The observation proposals for XMM-Newton must be checked for certain sky environment parameters in order to guarantee the best possible scientific output. These checks are carried out by special software called Proposal Handling System (PHS) tools.

The PHS Tools include 19 different software tools. We were interested in one of them: the "EPIC specific expected x-ray count rate tool". There are actually two versions of this tool: the more usually referred to is XMM PIMMS, while there's also an online version called Web PIMMS.

The PIMMS tool needs certain input parameters, such as flux of target, energy range and mathematical model for the spectrum (out of these four: Black Body, Power Law, Thermal Bremmsthralung, or Raymond-Smith).

With these, PIMMS estimates the expected count rate. We checked if this works correctly by comparing the theoretical predictions made by PIMMS with real sky data, processed by ourselves. For this, we used about 50 ODF (Observation Data Files) covering different combinations of Cameras, Modes, Filters and Models.

In my time here I have learnt how to access data from the XMM-Newton Science Archive (XSA), in order to obtain all the ODFs that are needed for my project.I have also learnt how to use scripts to run the Science Analysis Software (SAS) over those ODFs in order to extract their spectra. At the beginning of my training period I already had the chance to perform a presentation of my project to other trainees and SOC staff. During the following months I obtained the results of the comparison between PIMMS/PHS  estimations and real model fluxes.

The results were very interesting and helped to understand better how PIMMS works, which was quite confusing at the time of our first results. We had a second presentation and then continued working to draw the final conclusions from our results.

Overall, I have found the project very interesting and I think it was an extraordinary opportunity to be able to work in Vilspa for this half a year.