The FITS formats which will be supported first by the Asterix interface will be those defined by the OGIP calibration memos, ie. the formats for time series, spectra, images and events as created by XSELECT.
What does this mean in practice? Data products created by XSELECT can be read directly into Asterix programs. Asterix copes quite easily with datasets without quality or errors attached where it makes sense to do so (such as XIMAGE format images).
Moving data from Asterix NDFs to FITS is more of a problem due the lack of certain features in the OGIP definitions. Rather than invent new FITS standards ourselves the default Asterix behaviour will be simply to ignore those NDF components which cannot be represented in FITS. Thus we cater for the user who wants to use software accessing FITS files conforming to the OGIP standards, but don't encourage him to create datasets which can't be read by anything else but Asterix.
The one exception to the above rule will be the graphics control information. Asterix applications will be able to write graphics control data into an extension of a FITS file which can then be used by GDRAW or the image processing.
Other FITS formats such as the MIDAS formats could be incorporated into the interface system if the demand was sufficient.