SMM was in operation from February 1980 to December 1989 and observed 12,773 solar flares.  Information about the instrument and solar flare identification methods are in the hxrbs_event_list_description.pdf file in this directory.  The SDAC SMM web site (http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/smm/hxrbs.html) also links to this PDF, and has links to yearly HXRBS event list text files. 

An IDL save file of the HXRBS event list is in $SSW/ssw/smm/hxrbs/idl,  You can read it via
	restore,'hxrbs_flare_catalog.sav',/verb
This restores the variable fldata that looks like this:
	IDL> help,fldata
	FLDATA          STRUCT    = -> FLARE Array[12773]
	IDL> help,fldata,/st
	** Structure FLARE, 8 tags, length=104, data length=96:
	   START_SECS      DOUBLE           35797610.
	   PEAK_SECS       DOUBLE           35797775.
	   FLARE_NUM       INT              1
	   DURATION        LONG               522
	   PEAK_RATE       LONG               177
	   TOT_COUNTS      LONG             20080
	   REGION          INT           2287
	   FLAGS           BYTE      Array[64]
(START_SECS and PEAK_SECS are seconds since 1-Jan-1979, and can be shown in absolute time format using anytim, e.g. print,anytim(fldata[0].start_secs,/vms) )

This directory holds FITS files containing the SMM HXRBS data for all of the solar flares observed by HXRBS. The files are organized in year directories and are named 
hxrbs_yyyymmdd_hhmm_hhmm_flarenumber.fits
where yyyymmdd_hhmm is the start time, the second hhmm is the end time, and flarenumber is the number assigned to the flare by the HXRBS team.  
(NOTE: These files are also available at the SDAC (http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/smm/hxrbs/), but the file names are different.  On the SDAC site, they are named hxrbs_flarenumber.fits.)

The OSPEX and SHOW_SYNOP packages in SSW include software to automatically find, copy, and read these files.


Kim Tolbert, 14-Jul-2015