Heasoft/software version + heasoft broken now?

Helpdesk Software and Environments
1

Hello,

  1. I was wondering what is the easiest way to check what version of software like Heasoft or SAS is currently installed. I could not immediately find information on this.

  2. In the process of trying to figure that out I came across issues with the heasoft jupyter kernel, it seems broken. Cells do not execute (e.g. import numpy, 2+2) while other kernels seem to work ok.

Thank you!

2

Hi @ogoann, to address your first question - the easiest way to find those versions is to activate the HEASoft and SAS conda environments, and then use the tool-specific version commands to retrieve that information.

So in a new terminal you would run;

For HEASoft (I’m also including the outputs I get):

micromamba activate heasoft
ftversion

26Sep2025_V6.36

And for SAS (best to run micromamba deactivate before this, if you’re in the same terminal):

micromamba activate sas
sas --version

sas (gui-1.53.1) [22.1.0-a8f2c2afa-20250304]

Our current versions are HEASoft 6.36 and SAS v22.1.0.

Regarding your second question - thank you very much for reporting the problem, we’re looking into that now, and we’ll try to get it fixed as quickly as possible.

3

Thanks David!

Follow up question: new Heasoft has been out for ~1.5 months now, do you have a guess for a timeline for when it will be available on Fornax? In general, what is the typical expectation for major new releases of NASA mission data reduction software to be updated here following new releases?

5

Happy to help!

We don’t yet have a policy for exactly when we need to update software by, but if you need HEASoft v6.37.1 we can certainly get that moving for you.

6

Sounds awesome, thank you! I wonder if it’s a good idea to add software version to the name of the kernel, especially if you think somewhere down the line it might be good idea to keep ~2 most recent versions of major software (so that say if someone now is working on a large project with 6.36 they don’t have to re-do everything with 6.37).

7

Hi Anna, we do intend to make sure that older versions of our software images are available to select on the console when launching a Fornax instance, for exactly the reason you just said.

Having the version in the environment name would be nice, but unfortunately would have a lot of knock on effects whenever we changed the environment name, particularly with notebooks that have the old kernel name baked in, and all the tutorial notebooks.

Also, I wanted to let you know that we think we have a solution for the problems with the HEASoft kernel, and that should hopefully be available sometime tomorrow. I’ll let you know when its fixed :slightly_smiling_face:

8

Good morning Anna, we now have a fix applied for the problem you identified with launching the HEASoft kernel in a notebook. We’re confident it should work, but please let me know if you still have an issue.