It has been over a decade since the first paper was published containing results determined using the general X-ray spectral-fitting program XSPEC. Since then XSPEC has become the most widely used program for this purpose, being the de facto standard for the ROSAT and the de jure standard for the ASCA and XTE satellites. Probably the most important features of XSPEC are the large number of theoretical models available and the facilities for adding new models.

HEASOFT combines XANADU, high-level, multi-mission software for X-ray astronomical spectral, timing, and imaging data analysis tasks, and FTOOLS (ascl:9912.002), general and mission-specific software to manipulate FITS files, into one package. It also contains contains the NuSTAR subpackage of tasks, NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS). The source code for the software can be downloaded; precompiled executables for the most widely used computer platforms are also available for download. As an additional service, HEAsoft tasks can be directly from a web browser via WebHera.

EXOSIMS generates and analyzes end-to-end simulations of space-based exoplanet imaging missions. The software is built up of interconnecting modules describing different aspects of the mission, including the observatory, optical system, and scheduler (encoding mission rules) as well as the physical universe, including the assumed distribution of exoplanets and their physical and orbital properties. Each module has a prototype implementation that is inherited by specific implementations for different missions concepts, allowing for the simulation of widely variable missions.

The ROSAT X-Ray Background Tool (sxrbg) calculates the average X-ray background count rate and statistical uncertainty in each of the six standard bands of the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS) diffuse background maps (R1, R2, R4, R5, R6, R7) for a specified astronomical position and a search region consisting of either a circle with a specified radius or an annulus with specified inner and outer radii centered on the position. The values returned by the tool are in units of 10^-6 counts/second/arcminute^2. sxrbg can also create a count-rate-based spectrum file which can be used with XSpec (ascl:9910.005) to calculate fluxes and offers support for counts statistics (cstat), an alternative method for generating a background spectrum. HEASoft (ascl:1408.004) is a prerequisite for building. The code is in the public domain.