SAMP Connectivity

    Simple Application Messaging Protocol (SAMP; see the IVOA Standard and additional material) is a messaging protocol that enables astronomy software tools to interoperate and communicate. It enables files to be streamed to astronomy software; the files don't need to be downloaded locally and then opened in these applications - they are sent directly.

    ESA Solar Orbiter Archive makes use of the SAMP Web Profile (Javascript library) to interoperate with other astronomy tools via the SAMP protocol.

    SAMP Web Profile allows web applications to interoperate and communicate with SAMP-capable desktop-based tools such as Aladin, Topcat, JHelioviewer or Autoplot. It has been tested and validated on the major web browsers, like Firefox, Edge, Safari or Chrome; however, recent updates to Chrome have affected the functionality. If you face problems using SAMP with Chrome, please see the workaround detailed below.

    Please note that is only possible to share public products via SAMP even when logged into the ESA Solar Orbiter Archive.

    Launch at least one of the following software tools to interoperate with your application:

     

    • Aladin: Interactive software sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases.
      (Accepts tabular data and FITS Images)

     

    • Topcat: Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables
    • Interactive graphical viewer and editor for tabular data. Designed for use with astronomical tables such as object catalogues, it understands a number of different astronomically important formats.
    • (Accepts tabular data in CDF or FITS but only FITS which contain TABLE extensions)

     

    • JHelioviewer: Visualisation tool for solar data based on the JPEG 2000 compression standard and part of the open source ESA/NASA Helioviewer Project.
      (Accepts data from FITS images)

     

    • Autoplot: Interactive browser for data on the web; give it a URL or the name of a file on your computer and it tries to create a sensible plot of the contents in the file. See note below on enabling SAMP in Autoplot.
      (Accepts data from CDF and FITS Images).

     

     

    Users of Google Chrome may experience problems to send SAMP requests to other VO applications.

    If this is your case and you still need to use SAMP with Google Chrome, please follow this workaround:

    1.Go to chrome://flags/ in the browser

    2.Set "Block insecure private network requests" to Disabled

    3.Relaunch Chrome

    In order to communicate between applications, SAMP makes use of a broker service for routing SAMP Messages. This service is automatically provided by the above VO tools, however by default autoplot does not have SAMP enabled. Therefore, if you want to communicate between Autoplot and this archive, you will need to enable SAMP.

    This can be done in two ways:

    1. At the Autoplot desktop application select "Tools ->startSampHub.jy".
    This will start a hub if one isn't going already, and should make Autoplot ready to receive messages from other software.

    2. The other way you can run it is using the JAR file with the command line option --samp, which will turn on SAMP immediately. e.g) java -jar autoplot.jar --samp