The top left side of MIDL's main screen shows a list of missions whose datasets are available in the tool. Only one of the missions in the list can be selected at any given time. To switch to a different mission, highlight the name of the mission you want, and click on the "Switch to Selected Mission" button.
Other lists in the main screen depend on the setting for the currently selected mission. The instrument list for example, which is just below the mission list, shows all the instruments (whose data are available in MIDL) from the currently selected mission.
On the right half of the main window is a large panel for viewing summary images. You may browse through the summary images by clicking on the next and previous buttons at the top of the summary image panel. This is of course an excellent way to see broad brush features of the data.
A mission may provide more than one type of summary image. The list of summary images for the currently selected mission is shown in a panel to the left of the summary image itself. To switch to a different summary image type, highlight the desired type, and click the "Use Selected Sum. Img. Type" button.
Note that the time width of the different summary images may not be the same. In other words, some summary images may represent 24 hours of data, others 12, others 1 week, etc.
Between the summary image panel and the mission list is the list of plotting tools. Each plotting tool will display data from one or more instruments of the currently selected mission.
When you launch one of the plotting tools, the time range of the data displayed by the tool is determined in one of two ways. First, you may specify a time range manually by entering start and stop times. The entry boxes for the times are at the bottom left of the main screen.
You may also specify a time range by highlighting a region over a summary image. The vertical red bars can be dragged by the mouse. The region between the bars is then used as a time range to select the data which is fed to a plotting tool. Note that if you want to analyze a time region wider than the summary image, you will have to enter the times manually in the start and stop time entry boxes.
If a mission has more than one
instrument of the same type (more than one particle
instrument, for example), then the plotting tool
for that kind of data cannot automatically determine
which data to grab for the plot. When you launch a tool
and the data source is ambiguous, then you will be asked
to select the instrument whose data you want to see.
The data in this tool is usually high time resolution data, especially the particle data. This dat can be memory intensive, and so it may not be possible to analyze more than a few days' data at once. If you attempt to pull multiple days of data into a plotting tool, it will take a while to load the data over the internet, and your computer may run out of memory as the data is unpacked on your computer. If this happens, you probably should close the tool and start over. In the future, we are planning to add a data averaging feature which can be used to look at longer time periods of data without pulling in every single high time resolution measurement.