Neither Mark nor I will be able to participate in the telecon due to
schedule conflicts. Here are our comments.

The INDEX.TAB is very thin. 

I recommend the following additional keywords in the label:

SPACECRAFT_NAME        
SPACECRAFT_ID          
INSTRUMENT_NAME        
INSTRUMENT_ID          

These are not listed in the Standards Reference as required or optional
keywords, but are listed as optional columns. Since the value for each will
be constant, they can be moved to the label.

I think TARGET_NAME should definitely be a column. It would just be 
the target identified by the CIMS request ID. This could be very 
valuable to the user.

What I am more concerned about here is instrument-specific 
information. Spectral resolution and operating mode are really 
basic pieces of information that will vary from one spectrum to the 
next. I should be able to look these up in the table. Operating mode 
includes information like which of the focal planes are being read 
and whether on-board co-adding is happening. 

I recommend expanding the descriptions for the time columns. Clearly this
information appears elsewhere, but for someone in the future trying to use
this data, having the information in the label is very convenient. Here are
examples of the descriptions we used for START_TIME &
SPACECRAFT_CLOCK_START_COUNT for a Voyager file.         

START_TIME 
    DESCRIPTION                 = "Observation start time associated
with the data in the given file. Given in PDS date/time format
('yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.sss')."


SPACECRAFT_CLOCK_START_COUNT
    DESCRIPTION                 = "Voyager FDS ('Flight Data System')
count associated with the beginning of this file. The field
format is 'hhhhh:mm:sss', specifying the FDS 'hours', 'minutes' and
'seconds'. There are 60 FDS minutes (numbered 0-59) in an FDS hour.
For the PPS instrument, there are 800 FDS seconds (numbered 1-800) in
an FDS minute. An FDS hour equals 48 true minutes; an FDS minute
equals 48 true seconds; an FDS second equals 0.06 true seconds. Each
PPS record consists of 100 FDS seconds or 6 true seconds of data."
  END_OBJECT                    = COLUMN

================================================================

Data file contents. 

I'm looking at three files as representative (the files are from the
DATA/NAV_DATA directory): 

RIN01010102.LBL - a representative label for one of the binary data files

RIN.FMT - a Vanilla format file giving column descriptions for the data
files.

RIN.LBL - the detached label for RIN.FMT.

The RIN.FMT is not sufficient. 

At the very least, detailed and explicit definitions of each column object
are needed. I don't know what restrictions apply to Vanilla format files,
but since the .FMT files don't change, it just shouldn't be that hard to
take a Vanilla format file and make a useful PDS compliant format file. 

In RIN01010102.LBL. 

As I understand it, the primary key field is integer encoded spacecraft
event time - the spacecraft event time, stored as the number of seconds
since the start of 1970. Combined with the detector number (det), it is the
parameter used to associate the various CIRS data file fragments. 

A brief statement similar to the above should appear as a DESCRIPTION in the
table object for ALL of the files where START_PRIMARY_KEY, STOP_PRIMARY_KEY,
and PRIMARY_KEY are used.  I know that once someone gets the hang of this
file structure the descriptions become redundant, but since this is far from
a standard PDS file format, we should do all we can to make it easy to
follow.


Cheers,

Mitch