The SIXTE team is happy to announce its next hands-on workshop. This workshop will be dedicated to preparing for the NewAthena special issue and will therefore focus on the NewAthena mission - the WFI and X-IFU detectors.
Given the worldwide NewAthena community, the workshop will be held online (details will be provided soon), at a time that is hopefully somewhat accommodating for non-European attendees, from 6-7 May, 15-18 CEST (13-16 UT).
SIXTE is a software package for simulating X-ray observations and is used as the official end-to-end simulator for both current and future X-ray missions, such as eROSITA, THESEUS, and NewAthena. It can also be used as a tool for writing observing proposals for missions such as XRISM, as well as for the scientific analysis of existing observations with strong instrumental effects such as pileup.
The workshop introduces SIXTE, with a focus on simulations of the NewAthena WFI and X-IFU. It will include basic simulations to get started with SIXTE, as well as highly detailed and complex simulation setups. The workshop is therefore well-suited to both experienced and new users of SIXTE.
After the introduction of the tools, participants can also receive assistance for setting up their own, more involved simulations for the special issue or other simulations. Contents of the workshop include:
- General SIMPUT/SIXTE Introduction
- Set-up and Tools Overview
- SIXTE Implementation of the WFI and X-IFU
- Practical Sessions (partially in parallel):
- First Simulations
- Analysis and Source Variability
- Survey Simulations (including dithering)
- Extended Source Simulations
- High Count-Rate Simulations and Branching Ratios
The intended audience is graduate students and scientists with a background in X-ray astronomy who are interested in performing simulations for NewAthena. An involvement in the special issue is not necessary. As we will mainly focus on NewAthena, only limited support, on a best-effort basis, can be provided for simulations with other instruments. Note, however, that SIXTE allows very easy switching between instruments and, therefore, after the workshop, the participants will be able to easily simulate other missions with SIXTE.
