RXTE ASM Data Finders (gdt.missions.rxte.asm.missiontable)

A natural question may be: “Where do I find the data I need?” Well, you’re in luck, because this will show you how to find the data you seek. RXTE ASM Data is hosted publicly on Zenodo. You will need to download the tar files to get the mission table and individual dwell files. The data are stored in a consistent directory structure. But instead of having to navigate a winding maze of directories, we provide a couple of classes built to retrieve the data you want once you’ve downloaded it. RXTE ASM data is ordered into dwells and dwell sequence numbers that are summarized in the mission table file.

Finding RXTE ASM Data

First make sure you have followed the instructions here to download and unpack the RXTE ASM data.

Let’s start with reading in the RXTE ASM Mission Table. Note that this table needs to be read only at the beginning of a session:

>>> from gdt.missions.rxte.asm.missiontable import RXTEMissionTable
>>> asm_table_data = RXTEMissionTable.open()
RXTEMissionTable read complete

Now select a time you are interested in, for example a trigger time from RXTE or another mission

>>> from gdt.missions.rxte.asm.time import Time
>>> time = Time("1997-08-15T12:07:04")
>>> t0 = time.rxte

We don’t really care about the directory structure, we just want the data. So this class finds the files we want, if the time is within th data, and returns the file names. The file names contain the dwell time (in spacecraft time 114262324, or t0.sct) and the dwell sequence number (21).

>>> dwell_file = RXTEMissionTable.get_dwell_file(t0)
>>> print(dwell_file)
camera_data/cam_dwasc_02/amts114262324.21

If we want data from 90s after t0, we can get that dwell file name too:

>>> dwell_file2 = RXTEMissionTable.get_dwell_file(t0+90)
>>> print(dwell_file2)
camera_data/cam_dwasc_02/amts114262324.22

Great! Now we have two dwell files. Continue to learn how to read them in for plotting.

Reference/API

gdt.missions.rxte.asm.missiontable Module

Classes

RXTEMissionTable(times, dwell_seq_nums, ...)

The Mission Table containing the times of each dwell, the dwell sequence number, and dwell ID.

Class Inheritance Diagram