General Access to GRO/BATSE Solar Database Maintained at NASA/GSFC

For the use of the solar physics and astronomy communities, a system that is
available on-line for quick-look access to the solar flare data from the
Gamma-Ray Observatory (GRO) has been established. This system is designed to
allow easy access to the hard X-ray data from the Burst And Transient Source
Experiment (BATSE) on GRO and is maintained at the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM)
Data Analysis Center by personnel from the Hard X-ray Burst Spectrometer
(HXRBS) group at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The BATSE instrument was developed for the detection and localization of
cosmic gamma-ray bursts by a team led by BATSE PI, Jerry Fishman, at Marshall
Space Flight Center. It consists, in part, of 8 large area detectors, each
2025 sq. cm, placed on the corners of the GRO spacecraft with the orientation
of the faces being those of a regular octahedron. Although optimized for the
detection of non-solar gamma-ray bursts, these detectors are far more
sensitive than any previous spacecraft-borne hard X-ray flare instrumentation
both for the detection of small microflares and the resolution of fine
temporal structures.

The data in our quick-look BATSE database are the DISCLA (Discriminator Large
Area) rates recorded every 1.024 s for each detector in 4 energy channels,
25-50, 50-100, 100-300, and >300 keV. These data are suitable for temporal
correlation with data at other wavelengths and they provide a first look into
the BATSE and other GRO instrument flare data sets. The BATSE and other GRO PI
groups should be contacted for the availability of data sets at higher time or
spectral resolution or at higher energies.

The daily data files containing DISCLA data and housekeeping data collected at
the Mission Operations Center at MSFC are copied to the HXRBS MicroVAX (SPAN
node name ISIS or 6208) and merged into one daily BATSE Data Base (BDB) file.
These data are surveyed for flares and a catalog of solar events is generated.
A collection of Flare Data Base (FDB) files is created containing data before,
during, and after these identified solar flares. Quicklook plots of the
entire data set, the flare catalog, and the FDB files are readily accessible
on-line.

The BATSE solar flare server is available from:
ftp://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/pub/batse/

A detailed description of the BATSE solar flare data is available
from: https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/batse/batse_archive.html