PaPCo grew out of the CRRES data analysis performed at MPAe, which requires the use of several data sets for common analysis. Indeed, one of the scientific aims of CRRES was to investigate the particle budget in the inner magnetosphere with an extremely wide energy range; from plasma eV right up to highly relativistic particles in the GeV range, using a suite of particle instruments.
However, PaPCo was designed with the needs of a common tool for the computer layman in mind, who wants to access large and varied data sets. PaPCo is thus suited for use in the ISTP community, where the prime objective is the simultaneous analysis of multi-spacecraft / ground-based multi-instrument data.
PaPCo intends to provide some basic graphics tools for a wide variety of data. It is NOT intended to be a substitute for a detailed analysis system for an individual data product from a specific instrument, such as may be used for extremely high time resolution detector by detector analysis on a particle spectrometer. Such tools are also used for instrument debugging. However, if such a tool is an independent stand-alone IDL widget application, it can be easily interfaced into PaPCo.
The most important design feature of PaPCo is expandability. PaPCo supplies a basic framework in such a way that existing data extraction and plotting routines can be used with minimal modification. A great deal of effort was invested to make extension of PaPCo to new data sets as easy and simple as possible. It is, however, the responsibility of the user to write his own modules for PaPCo. In other words: We will maintain the car. You decide who to put in it and where to go.