Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is v9r15p3. Here are the differences from v9r15p2. It is not a major update, obviously, but looks like it has some useful improvements for likelihood analysis and for simulating sources with EBL attenuation.
The FSSC is wrapping up pre-release testing of the subset of v9r15p2 that will be publicly released next month. We may get some feedback on they have found.
Data products: Studies in C&A on Pass 7 are continuing.
Databases and related utilities
N.B. The bug that Vlasios reported with the FT2 files retrieved by the new AstroServer turned out to be in the 30-s versions of the Pass 7 reprocessed versions (i.e., the files with the new FT2 columns). The Pass 6 FT2 files that the AstroServer retrieves are fine.
A total of a 3 intervals in the FT2 file for the 11-month catalog analysis have livetime fraction<=0 but still contain events. For most applications, these problems out of >760k intervals are quite ignorable. For some, like an analysis that Jim made, these odd intervals are show-stoppers. He suggested that filtering (gtmktime) on LIVETIME/(STOP-START)>0.65 will remove these and a few other intervals with suspiciously low livetime fractions. The ISOC has the information about the bad intervals.
Likelihood analysis
No direct news. The release notes indicate a bug-fix was applied to the UpperLimits class in pyLikelihood.
STOP PRESS (21 Jul 2009, 18:26 UTC): Unfortunately, there is still a bug in this class, a new one introduced when I tried to fix the previous one. I'll fix that tonight and will tag a new pyLikelihood and make a new ST release. -Jim
gttsmap now generates maps with CDELT1<0., so they are oriented correctly on the sky (RA or longitude increasing to the left).
GRB tools
No direct news. rspgen was updated to handle azimuthal dependence in the effective area tables
Pulsar tools
No news
Observation simulation
LR implemented some new EBL models, including Gilmore, Franceschini et al., and Razzaque et al.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and potential improvements were topics last week along with the year-1 Catalog paper.