QSAS: Science Analysis Software

Imperial College London

QSAS: Science Analysis Software for Space Plasmas

The QSAS project has moved to Sourceforge, and these pages are for access to archived versions and documentation only.

Downloads and support are now only available on Sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qsas

Maintained Web pages are at https://qsas.sourceforge.io

QSAS is a software package which provides a flexible, extendable environment for the selection, manipulation, and display of space physics data. QSAS is written in C/C++ and is compiled using the gnu compiler set, and makes use of several elements of third-party software, including Qt (http://qt-project.org/downloads), cdf (http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/) and PLplot (http://plplot.sourceforge.net/).

Currently available for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

Finding out about QSAS

QSAS Help Pages contains more detailed information about QSAS capabilities.
QSAS Screen shots shows the major functionality in use.
Sample Session is a tar file of a sample QSAS session to help get a feel of the system. This file is also shipped with the distribution. If it is not available in your installation (named SampleSession), extract the tar archive in the QSAS_HOME/tmp directory and open from the QSAS 'File/Restore Session' menu.
Some Notes on Writing QSAS Plug-ins provides guidance for users with personal analysis routines to enable them to receive data from and return data to QSAS via the dynamic QSAS Plug-in Interface. Also available as a pdf file.
DvObjectClass.html provides programmers documentation on the DVOS kernel that can be used within plugins.

Other specifications can be found within the various items supplied with QSAS.

Obtaining QSAS

New downloads are now only available through sourceforge,
https://sourceforge.net/projects/qsas
which will provide the appropriate version for your platform.

QSAS is provided free under GPL public licence, see licence file.

Linux download is a source distribution which builds itself using a build script (QSAS_3_2/bin/build). Edit the script to give the location of the QSAS distribution after download and the target directory for installing QSAS into, along with QT, and CDF installations on your platform, then type './build qsas' in the bin directory of the distribution:

Mac OSX download is ready to use and need only be unpacked and placed in /Applications.

Launch QSAS on the Mac by double clicking on the QSAS icon /Applications/QSAS_3_2/QSAS.

Windows downloadis ready to use.

After unzipping, a QSAS32 folder will be created. If you place the QSAS32 directory inside C:\Program Files\QSAS, i.e., so that you have C:\Program Files\QSAS\QSAS32, it is ready to use.

 Start QSAS by double-clicking QSAS.bat. You can also make shortcuts to this launcher.

If you install QSAS somewhere else, edit the first line of the QSAS.bat script to point to your installation directory. If QSAS launches but instantly dies, try to run this script from within a CMD console to inspect any error messages which may be output. Usually the problem is in the PATH specification, related to the installation location.  

On platforms where it does not run out of the box, it is possible to build from source. In which case it will also be necessary to install msys2 (part of the MinGW package) and NASA's CDF libraries, available from: 

http://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20installation/,  http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/sw_and_docs.html
See the instructions in QSAS32/docs for more details. The msys2 installation will fetch and install both mingw and Qt5 for you, which are the remaining items necessary to build QSAS. 

Documentation

QSAS Help Pages (html) and other documentation are included in all distributions in the directory doc.

Older Versions of QSAS 3_1 are available and can be used for converting savesets.

Older Versions of QSAS 2_4 are available and can be used for converting savesets.

Older Versions of QSAS 2_3 are available, but are no longer supported.

Sample Data Files

The QSAS distribution contains some example data from Cluster Summary parameters as well as a sample session.

As well as Cluster Exchange Format (.cef) and NASA Common Data Format (.cdf) files, QSAS is able to read many ascii data files in either tabular or delimited syntax. These ascii files will need headers (either as detached (.qfh) headers or pasted onto the front of the data file itself. To help with the construction of suitable headers, some samples for different data sets are included with the distribution and are also available below, and collectively as a gzipped tar file.

Description	With a few data records	Header only
NASA Omni High Resolution files with syntax omni_hr_format.txt	omni_hr.qft	omni_hr.qfh
Cluster vector and scalar variable examples in tabular (.qft) syntax	CL_SP_FGM_20020328_V01.qft
Cluster vector and scalar variable examples in Cluster Exchange (.cef )syntax	CL_SP_FGM_20020328_V01.cef
Cluster vector and scalar variable examples in delimited (.qfd) syntax	CL_SP_FGM_20020328_V01.qfd
Cassini data in Cluster Exchange (.cef) syntax	Test_Cassini.cef
Time Interval as a non-record varying variable (with tabular .qft extension)	SampleTI.qft
Event List (list of time intervals) in delimited format	SampleEvents.qfd	SampleEvents.qfh
Event List as XML VOTable file	SampleEvents.xml

Plug-in Libraries

Plug-ins written by the QSAS team are distributed with the QSAS tar files, and install automatically at QSAS installation.
Many of the plugins provided by Stein Haaland are also distributed with QSAS precompiled.

Other QSAS plug-ins are also available from Stein Haaland.

Acknowledging QSAS in Publications

The preferred wording for acknowledging use of QSAS in publications is "Data analysis was done with the QSAS science analysis system provided by the United Kingdom Cluster Science Centre (Imperial College London and Queen Mary, University of London) supported by The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)" or similar wording as appropriate.

Authors

This software was created by the CSC Team at IC. The team members have included, in alphabetical order, Tony Allen, Stuart Bale, Janet Barnes, Nora Bounaira, David Burgess, Gareth Chisham, Markus Fraenz, Anthony Hare, James Meakin, Alban Rochel, Steve Schwartz and Abdeslam Serroukh. Current team members are shown with an email address.

QSAS is developed as part of the Cluster Science Centre within the UK and funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The software is provided as is under the GPL public licence, though QM and IC retain the copyright. No liability is accepted for any damage resulting from the installation or use of this software, and no guarantee of its suitability is implied for any use other than the scientific visualisation and manipulation of Cluster science data. Copyright.

Last up-dated 04 September 2019

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