THE ON-GROUND ACQUISITION AND DATA, ANALYSIS SYSTEM FOR THE PDS DETECTOR ON BOARD THE SAX SATELLITE

The Phoswich Detection System (PDS) is the high-energy (15-300 keV) in strument on board the Italian-Dutch X-ray astronomy satellite SAX. Fun ctional tests were carried on at BICRON (Newbury, Ohio, USA) and at LA BEN (Vimodrone, Italy). Full ground calibrations have been performed b etween the end of 1994 and the beginning of 1995. We describe in the f ollowing the system that we used to acquire and analyse the data comin g from the PDS experiment during the ground tests and calibrations. It will be used to store and maintain data during both the pre-operation al and the operational phases. In a previous report (DAL FIUME D., FRO NTERA F., ORLANDINI M. and TRIFOGLIO M., AIP Conf Proc., 61 (1994) 395 ) we described the general architecture of the data analysis system. I n this report we give a detailed description of the entire system, inc luding the hardware and software developed by LABEN to acquire data du ring on-ground tests. A complete description of the different modules, user interface, inter-process communications, analysis and display to ols are presented. Current status of the project is discussed.