Preface: The Herschel Observation Planning Software (HSpot)

Table of Contents

1. Note about Version 5 of the HSpot Manual
2. Purpose of this Document
3. What this Document Does Not Provide
4. How to use this manual
5. Differences between HSpot versions on different platforms
6. A disclaimer
7. Acknowledgements

1. Note about Version 5 of the HSpot Manual

This version of the HSpot manual and on-line Help has gone through further revisions since the OT1 Call versions. When HSpot reached the Open Time (OT1) Call version (5.0), the extensive updates included detailed post-launch knowledge and updates, particularly in the instrument chapters. Further modifications to observing modes have occurred in the intermediate versions of the 5.* series, some of them extensive and HSpot 6.0 for the OT2 Call now features further new, flight-tested, second generation observing modes and extensively updated calibration information, plus a series of fixes, some major, some minor that resolve issues in previous versions of HSpot, particularly related to HIFI, which has had many important and complex changes over the last year. In some cases the time estimator now gives significantly different results from the initial OT1 version.

In the 3.x version, the information about installation, requirements and supported platforms was completely revised. In the Version 4 there were many changes in the instrument-specific functionality, so the instrument-specific chapters (9-12) were extensively revised by Tony Marston and the Instrument and Calibration Scientist Team to take into account the many new features that were included and the features that have been supressed since the initial Guaranteed Time user release of HSpot. The rest of the manual was revised line-by-line and both the text and the screenshots updated. This reflects both the many tweaks and improvements made at the HSC to fix bugs and increase functionality and the constant updates in the Spot Core made at IPAC.

Although HSpot 6.0 is not a major evolution of HSpot with respect to the final GT2 Call version, it includes no less than 13 significant and major upgrades with respect to HSpot 5.3.2. Most of these will not be obvious to the majority of users, but several fix important bugs that have been reported, mainly in specialist use of HSpot. Overall, 31 changes have been made to HSpot and Proposal Handling with respect to the final OT1 Phase 2 version (5.2.4).