eROSITA Near Real Time Analysis

We present a sketch of the Near Real Time Analysis (NRTA) software of the upcoming X-ray scanning mission eROSITA. The aim of the NRTA is to provide not only a first quick standardized analysis of the incoming data from the satellite, but also to perform numerous health checks on the science and housekeeping data to monitor the performance of the instrument and enable the mission operators to react quickly if necessary. As a first step, the NRTA pipeline will decode the telemetry stream and write the event and housekeeping information to separate FITS files. In a second step, the health checks will be performed and detector light curves, spectra, and images will be displayed. The third step is to run the eROSITA standard pipeline on the science data and to display the resulting images, sky maps, and source light curves. Furthermore we also perform simulations of the X-ray sky (based on the ROSAT all sky survey supplemented by additional simulated sources according to the log N - log S diagrams of the Chandra Deep Fields) as eROSITA will observe it to study the capabilities of the instrument and to assess the requirements for the NRTA.