A revised version of the ASC World Wide Web (WWW) homepage is now available at: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/asc/axaf-welcome.html. The purpose of this homepage is to provide information about AXAF to the technically literate WWW surfer (a public outreach homepage is also being planned), and to give electronic access to ASC documents, schedules, news, data and links to other AXAF and X-ray related WWW pages.
The current version of the homepage has a description of AXAF and the ASC, as well as active (`clickable') images of the pre-launch schedule and the spacecraft subsystems. The latest version of the Science Instrument Notebook is available in hypertext format. This was prepared by the Science Data Systems Planning Group, and it consists of detailed descriptions of each of the major AXAF Science Instruments and the Pointing Control and Aspect Determination System, and there is a chapter devoted to the High Resolution Mirror Assembly. The most current instrument parameters (such as effective area or spectral resolution) can be found here. The ASC homepage also has links to hypertext versions of the three issues of this newsletter, and reports of the AXAF Users' committee.
The ASC WWW site will evolve as the mission progresses. New documents (such as Proposal and Software Guides) will be added as they become available. We are currently investigating user-friendly search engines for the User Support document database, and hope to have a prototype available for testing on the Science Instrument Notebook soon. The results of the Instrument/mirror calibration effort at the MSFC X-ray Calibration Facility will be made available via the ASC homepage (and FTP), as will the results of in-flight calibrations. Comments and suggestions welcome! Please send E-mail to usupport@asc.harvard.edu.
