NDCube: An N-Dimensional Data Analysis Tool For Current and Future Missions

Heliospheric missions are increasingly providing richer, more complex and bigger data for scientists to explore. Current missions like IRIS and future missions like DKIST supply terabytes of multi-dimensional data combining spectroscopy, imaging, polarization, etc. at high time cadence. While these new observations bring greater opportunities for scientific discovery, they can also make exploring and understanding the data more challenging. In this presentation we outline an ongoing effort to develop an open-source Python-based software package, ndcube, for easily and generically inspecting, analyzing and visualizing N-D dimensional data and its associated metadata. Such a package is an ideal starting place for developing data analysis tools for both current and future missions. Its ability to handle World Coordinate System (WCS) transformations from pixel to real world coordinates make it well suited to observations taken throughout the heliosphere. This puts it in an ideal position to service the heliospheric satellite missions of tomorrow. Ndcube is currently being used as the basis of a new Python data analysis package for IRIS data (IRISpy) that will open up IRIS science to a new generation due to Python’s increasing ubiquity in University programs and its free and open source nature. Ndcube and the lessons learned in applying it to IRISpy are already being used to develop data analysis tools for DKIST. There are plans in the future to integrate ndcube into SunPy, the core Python-based open-source solar physics data analysis library. This could result in ndcube becoming the foundation for analyzing most data types in solar physics and beyond. The development of advanced, generic and open-source software tools like ndcube will play a powerful role in enabling the analysis of future missions’ observations by a broader and younger generation of scientists, and will hence facilitate future scientific discoveries in heliophysics.