The Herschel(1) PACS Pipeline Extensions: Making Tasks and Scripts Suitable for Interactive and Automatic Processing

We present some extensions which were added to the Herschel Common Software System (HCSS) for processing and analyzing observations of the PACS instrument (Poglitsch et al. 2010) on the Herschel Space Observatory (Pilbratt et al. 2010). PACS users and developers worked closely together to improve the user experience when interactively analyzing observations, in such a way that user friendly scripts can be shared with the pipeline for systematic processing. In this way we can easily keep the pipeline up-to-date with user contributed improvements. The most important goals of these improvements are: (1) Hide all the administrative work done in pipeline tasks (such as handling meta data) from the user; (2) Make sure that all tasks can be run step-by-step, even if loops over several products are needed (such loops are all hidden inside the pipeline tasks); (3) Provide convenience tools to deal with observations which are split into many parts (which we call slices).