XMM Users' Handbook

   
SciSim Graphical User Interface

SciSim can be executed from both the command line and from a specially developed GUI. The top-level SciSim GUI is presented in Fig. 84. It offers several click-on buttons for choosing operations.

  

Figure 84: The top-level GUI of the XMM Science Simulator (SciSim), presenting a field of view on the sky that will display any emitting sources that can be chosen from catalogues or defined by the user.

• ``File''

  This offers various options to import or save source, configuration and default parameters.

• ``Sources''

  Under this option the user manually edit model sources, simulate a random source distribution, import sources from catalogues and influence the properties of the modeled background.

• ``Spacecraft''

  Spacecraft effects will not need to be modeled by general XMM users. The options offered here are for instrument calibration purposes.

• ``Configure''

  This spawns the instrument configuration GUI, which is used for configuring SciSim, see below.

• ``Simulate''

  Start/stop a simulation.

• ``Help''

  Information on the SciSim release version and the online help. Note that, in order to use the online help facility of SciSim, a viewer (Netscape or Internet Explorer) must be started on the same machine that runs SciSim.