LESIA Observatoire de Paris-PSL CNRS Sorbonne Université Université de Paris

Data Reading

Thursday 13 October 2022, by Xavier Bonnin

This page provides information in support to RPW data usage.

How to read the RPW science data files?

RPW science data are provided as NASA Common Data Format (CDF) files. Visit official NASA CDF Web site for more details about CDF format and how to read it.

Examples of RPW data usage


Solar Orbiter 8th Workshop RPW TDS & TNR data tutorials using cdflib and maser4py:

- Try on Binder
- Source files
- HTML TDS notebook and HTML TNR notebook



Analysis of TNR and LFR L2 data using pyrfu Python module:

- Try on Binder
- Source files
- HTML notebook



Analysis of LFR L2 data using spacepy Python module:

- Try on Binder
- Source files
- HTML notebook -


All RPW tutorial files are freely available in https://gitlab.obspm.fr/rpw/tutorials

User Supplied Software

MASER4PY is a Python 3 package to handle radio data, including RPW.

MASER4IDL is an IDL library with some readers for RPW data.

A Python program by Erik Johansson (IRF-Uppsala) for mirroring Solar Orbiter Archive (SOAR) data locally.

A light user-friendly online tool to vizualize Solar Orbiter location and trajectory over the mission.

TOPCAT is an interactive graphical viewer and editor for tabular data. It understands a number of different astronomically important formats, including CDF.