SPEDAS 4.0 now available

The SPEDAS development team is pleased to announce the release of SPEDAS 4.0!

SPEDAS 4.0 includes numerous updates and enhancements to the command-line TPLOT plotting and analysis tools, as well as the GUI plotting and analysis tools. New plugins have been added to load MICA induction magnetometer data, and Cluster datasets available via SPDF. Several other plugins were updated with the latest available tools from their respective development teams. In particular, the MMS plugin has been updated to fix a bug that caused problems when using SPEDAS 3.2 to download data from the MMS Science Data Center.

The latest IGRF-13 field model has been added to SPEDAS 4.0, and is now used for coordinate transforms to and from the GSM system.

SPEDAS 4.0 includes support for downloading data from servers using the DAS2 protocol. Several crib sheets are available showing how to download data for the Galileo, Cassini, and Juno missions. This feature requires installation of an external DLM and platform-specific shared library (much like the GEOPACK and SPICE libraries), and is currently available for Linux and Windows only. Many thanks to Alexander Drozdov at UCLA, and Chris Piker at University of Iowa, for making DAS2 services available in SPEDAS!

For a more detailed list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes since SPEDAS 3.2, please see the release notes, at http://spedas.org/downloads/SPEDAS_4_0_release_notes.pdf

As usual, SPEDAS 4.0 is available as a source code zip file (suitable for users with full IDL licenses). For users without IDL licenses, we have also released the SPEDAS 4.0 “virtual machine” executables for Linux, Mac, and Windows. SPEDAS 4.0 downloads, installation instructions, and platform-specific installation notes are available via the SPEDAS wiki Downloads and Installation page .

Please email questions, bug reports, help requests, and enhancement suggestions to SPEDAS_Science_Support@ssl.berkeley.edu

The SPEDAS software development has been supported by NASA contracts NAS5-02099 (THEMIS mission), NNG17PZ01C  (SPEDAS general development), and NNG04EB99C (MMS sub-contract).  We would also like to thank the many software developers and SPEDAS users who have supported the development effort by contributing code, reporting problems, and suggesting enhancements.