SOXS was written and is maintained by Dr. John ZuHone at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. As a core member of the Lynx Team and the Lynx Science Support Office, John wrote SOXS specifically to support our concept study. It powers many of the simulated Lynx datacubes you will see in our Final Report.

SOXS isn’t just for Lynx, however. Its power and flexibility enables it to simulate X-ray observations from a vast number of (real and hypothetical) observatories. Indeed, SOXS has been widely used within the community to enable fantastic science.

WHAT IS SOXS?

SOXS is a software suite which creates simulated X-ray observations of astrophysical sources with any existing or planned X-ray Observatory. The goal of SOXS is to provide a comprehensive set of tools to design source models and convolve them with simulated models of X-ray instruments, particularly with Lynx.

There are two main entry points to SOXS: a command-line interface, and a Python interface. The former is simpler to use, but the latter has more power and flexibility. Both of these entry points are extensively documented with examples.

INSTALL SOXS

SOXS and its dependencies are installed as a standard Python package (compatible with Python 2.7+ and 3.5+).

If you use Anaconda Python, you may install SOXS using conda:

conda install -c jzuhone soxs

You may also use pip to install it (if you do not have pip, check that your executable is not named pip3, otherwise visit https://pip.pypa.io/ to download it):

pip install soxs

Alternatively, to install into your Python distribution from source:

python setup.py install

USE SOXS

Documentation for SOXS lives here. We also maintain a SOXS Google Group to get help and discuss related matters. If you have a specific code issue that seems like a bug or have a feature or enhancement request, the best place to note it is on the GitHub issues page so that we can keep track of it.

SOXS is powered by

…and developed with ❤️ by Dr. John ZuHone and the Lynx Science Support Office