The latest evolution of the XMM-Newton-mission PHS subsystem has expanded to a new development performed for the XRISM mission. XRISM is a JAXA-led X-ray observatory, developed through an international collaboration with NASA and ESA. New developed or updated software tools make up the entirety of the PHS subsystem, which is of vital importance for observatory-type missions, that include Announcements of Opportunity (AO) on their calendar. Future missions as the ESA led PLATO, ARIEL or the new ATHENA can be candidates for using them in the future. The tools are listed here below.
XIPS (XMM-Newton Interface for Proposal Submission) became operational just two years ago in XMM-Newton AO-21, replacing the HRPS (NASA HEASARC) software used since very early in the mission.
Designed for massive use, with a high activity in a few hours, it consists of a frontend developed with Angular 13, and a Backend developed with Java 11, using the SpringBoot-2 framework.
In its development, scalability has been taken into account so that it can be used in the future as an extended internal Proposal Handling system.
Visibility & Search Tool, with Ad-hoc software utilities for each mission, can share a frontend and access to data in a standardized way (eg VOTable). The XMM-Newton project is working on a new generation of this software, based on Vaadin 24 web framework (latest version), using SpringBoot 3 and Java Servlet 3.
XPET (XRISM Proposal Evaluation Tool) is the tool that will be used by the ESA-XRISM -Time Allocation Committee (TAC) members to evaluate, rank, and accept or reject proposals submitted from XRISM ARK/RPS. Based on the background and functionality of the XMM-Newton TAC tools, it has been developed with Angular 15 for the frontend, and with Java 11 for the backend, using the SpringBoot-2 framework. The purpose of the tool is to analyze all the observation proposals received for the AO of a mission, cataloguing and ranking them. The tool allows proposals to be assigned to specific committee members for evaluation. For this purpose, panels and panel’s chairpersons can be established to have greater control over the process. Finally, results can be handled by the administrators & chairpersons and exported from the database as a sheet or directly as a set of values.
Helpdesk. A new ESA Helpdesk, based on Jira Service Management, is being designed to provide support to the community on the above software.