Autoplot in Planetary Sciences and Heliophysics

Autoplot is data analysis software used by scientists in Heliophysics and Planetary Physics. It easily creates displays of data found in a variety of sources such as ASCII, NetCDF, and CDF files, and also from a number of data servers such as CDAWeb, Das2Servers, and HAPI servers. The SAMP protocol is supported so that IVOA websites using SAMP can push data to Autoplot. Its use with these sources is reviewed for scientists who wish to access data, but also for teams who would like to provide simple access to the data they produce.

Autoplot's feature set has developed incrementally along with Cassini, Van Allen Probes, Marsis, Juno, and other missions. Its Jython scripting creates an environment similar to IDL and SciPy which can easily combine data and support science workflows. Data downloaded from servers can be exported into IDL save and now Matlab files. Alternatively a Java bridge allows IDL, Matlab, and SciPy to read data directly using Autoplot's internal code, bypassing Autoplot's GUI interface.