5.19 Exposure Containers: Exposure Groups, Coordinated Parallels and Patterns

Whenever you wanted to create a set of exposures to be executed in a special way in RPS2 (e.g., a mosaic pattern on a region of the sky), you could specify exposures separately and then link them with exposure-level special requirements. In APT, some of these exposure-level special requirements (listed below) have been replaced with the use of exposure "containers" or groupings. Once an exposure container has been created in APT, you then place the related exposures in this container instead of using Special Requirements to link them.

See APT Help for the mechanics (i.e., a "how to") of placing exposures into containers.

The special requirements (see Table 7.2: "Supported Formats for Exposure Level Special Requirements" ) that have been replaced by these exposure containers or groupings (in parenthesis) are:

• Exposure Group Container (Type: Sequence)
  (replaces SEQuence <exposure-list> NON-INTerruptible):
  The exposures placed in this container will be observed without gaps due to Earth occultation or SAA passages. See 7.3.3 Special Observation Requirements.
• Coordinated Parallel Container
  (replaces PARallel <parallel-exp-list> WITH <primary-exp-list>):
  The exposures in this container using the "primary" SI will execute in parallel with a sequence of exposures using a "parallel" SI. The "primary" SI will be the SI used in the first exposure in this container. See 6.3 Coordinated Parallel Containers for more information.
• Pattern Container
  (replaces PATTERN <#> [<exposure-list>]):
  Each exposure placed in this container will be repeated at each point in a pattern of discrete pointing offsets from a target. The pattern # is assigned by APT. See Section 8.2, "Introduction to Patterns" for more information.

Note: You can place containers within containers (e.g., a coordinated parallel container can be inside a pattern container).