| Description: ! Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer was launched at the end of 1995 and up to now (2004) it has been successfully operating for more than 7 years. The mission was primarily designed to study the variability of X-ray sources on time scales from sub-milliseconds to years. The maneuvering capability of the satellite combined with the high photon throughput of its main detector (PCA) and high quality of background prediction (thanks to PCA intrumental group of LHEA, GSFC) has also made it possible to construct maps of the sky in energy band 3-20 keV. During its life time RXTE/PCA has collected a large amount of data from slew observations covering almost the entire sky. p We have utilized the slew parts of all RXTE/PCA observations performed from April 15, 1996-July 16, 2002 which amounts in total to approximately 50,000 observations. The exposure time at a given point in the map is typically between 200-500 seconds. The observational period before April 15, 1996 (High Voltage Epochs 1 and 2) was excluded from the analysis because during that time the PCA had significantly different gain and dependence of the effective area on energy. The data reduction was done using standard tools of the LHEASOFT with a set of packages written by M. Revnivtsev (HEAD/IKI, Moscow; MPA, Garching).p p The survey has several features. It has strongly different exposure times at different points on the sky that lead to strong variability of the statistical noise on images. Because of that the only meaningful representation of images is the map in units of statistical significance. After the detection of a source flux can be determined from the map in the 'flux' units. Map resolution is determined mainly by the slew rate of the RXTE (0.05-0.1°;/sec) and the time resolution of used data (16 sec, Std2 mode of the PCA). Sources can be detected down to the level of ~6esup-12/sup erg/s/cmsup2/sup, but at this level the confusion starts to play an important role. Details of the survey are presented in the paper of Revnivtsev et al. (2004). ]] |
| Completely compliant |
| Service URL |
| Input Parameter | Required | Present |
|---|---|---|
| Regular parameters: | ||
| POS | MUST | Yes |
| SIZE | MUST | Yes |
| INTERSECT | MAY | No |
| NAXIS | MAY | Yes |
| CFRAME | MAY | Yes |
| EQUINOX | MAY | Yes |
| CRPIX | MAY | No |
| CRVAL | MAY | No |
| CDELT | MAY | No |
| ROTANG | MAY | No |
| PROJ | MAY | Yes |
| FORMAT | MUST | Yes |
| Service specific parameters | ||
| INTERPOLATION | MAY | Yes |
| big | MAY | Yes |
| small | MAY | Yes |
| Field UCD | Required | Present | Required datatype |
Actual datatype |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regular fields: | ||||
| VOX:Image_Title | MUST | Yes | char | char |
| INST_ID | SHOULD | No | char | |
| VOX:Image_MJDateObs | SHOULD | No | double | |
| POS_EQ_RA_MAIN | MUST | Yes | double | double |
| POS_EQ_DEC_MAIN | MUST | Yes | double | double |
| VOX:Image_Naxes | MUST | Yes | int | int |
| VOX:Image_Naxis | MUST | Yes | int | int |
| VOX:Image_Scale | MUST | Yes | double | double |
| VOX:Image_Format | MUST | Yes | char | char |
| VOX:STC_CoordRefFrame | SHOULD | No | char | |
| VOX:STC_CoordEquinox | MAY | No | double | |
| VOX:WCS_CoordProjection | SHOULD | No | char | |
| VOX:WCS_CoordRefPixel | SHOULD | No | double | |
| VOX:WCS_CoordRefValue | SHOULD | No | double | |
| VOX:WCS_CDMatrix | SHOULD | No | double | |
| VOX:BandPass_ID | SHOULD | No | char | |
| VOX:BandPass_Unit | SHOULD | No | char | |
| VOX:BandPass_RefValue | SHOULD | No | double | |
| VOX:BandPass_HiLimit | SHOULD | No | double | |
| VOX:BandPass_LoLimit | SHOULD | No | double | |
| VOX:Image_PixFlags | SHOULD | Yes | char | char |
| VOX:Image_AccessReference | MUST | Yes | char | char |
| Service specific fields: | ||||
| VOX:LogicalName | MAY | YES | char | |