Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week and won't meet until 2008.
The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r3p4.
From Chris: "One item of possible interest to the group: beta-test 2 is still planned for late Feb/early March 08, but the GUG has requested to review the documentation as an agenda item in the February (25?) F2F meeting. Thus we'll need to release it (or at least a mature draft) about 1 week prior to that."
Data products: Some discussion of FT2 (LS-005) took place this week. The attitude quaternions to be added would be the same as GBM is including in their equivalent of a pointing history data product (GS-006).
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. Jim and Jean have been evaluating the effects on TS values from the improvement to the diffuse response calculations that Jim made and were described in last week's report; see Unbinned vs Binned TS in the Likelihood Tools.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James have finished the first version of gtptest, the tool that runs a variety of periodicity tests for a given set of timing parameters. They have started to add support for additional binary orbit models; this will also involve extending the definition of the pulsar ephemeris database file.
Observation simulation
No news. In the LATEST build (v6r1p2 of observationsSim), Jim has shifted PHI and EARTH_AZIMUTH_ANGLE to be in the range 0-360.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Not sure where this belongs. As described in more detail in his note to scisoftlist, Toby has added the pointlike package to the Science Tools. It is both a floor wax and a dessert topping (as Heather and SNL would say). He and his students are developing it for source localization and source finding. It also sees use in their LAT-spacecraft alignment analyses and via HEALPix can make all-sky convolutions, among other capabilities.
As probably mentioned in the core report, Toby has converted the astro package to a shareable library and moved the HEALPix code to its own package (healpix).
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
We had a brief meeting this week (attendees: D Smith, J Ballet, J Chiang, S Digel, T Burnett, C Patterson, D Band, E Winter, T Stephens, M Hirayama, D Sanchez, J Cohen-Tanugi, J McEnery); we will not meet next week.
As of Wednesday, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r3p4. Here are the differences from v9r3p2. The new version has important fixes in the astro (evaluation whether GLAST is in the SAA) and Likelihood (see below) packages.
Data products: We discussed getting the current definitions of the data products in the File Format Document that accompanies the Interface Control Document with the GSSC that needs to be in place by the time of the Flight Operations Review. Most of our discussion was about the format of LS-003 (livetime cubes). David's draft specification needed to have a number of header keywords that are not currently included. You might also want to see Jim's note to scisoftlist, if you missed it.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim described improving the accuracy of the calculation of the diffuse responses and the marked effect on TS values for unbinned likelihood - he gave a detailed description in the Catalog meeting yesterday. This work resolves the long-recognized discrepancies between binned and unbinned TS values.
Jim has also added warning messages if a source model includes sources well outside the ROI of the current analysis.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
David Smith described the discussions with the GSSC last week regarding potential enhancements to the pulsar tools. David and Dave Thompson at least were among the participants. Bordeaux will be contributing to implementing some of the requested updates.
Masa had microphone problems in the EVO meeting.
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Eric Winter (who also had microphone problems) is circulating a proposal to have Likelihood and obsSim XML model files be self identifying, using the "xmlns" attribute in the top-level element in the files. The formats are enough different that a program could figure out which is which but having an identifier at the top would make the job easier. This relates to Eric's work on an enhanced version of ModelEditor that could translate (where possible) between Likelihood and obsSim models.
Source Catalog
Met again this week. Jean presented comparisons of the performance of the source detection algorithms applied to the obssim2 data. Toby's pointfind currently has the best overall performance - see the plots that Jean posted. Jim also presented the results described above on evaluating TS in unbinned likelihood analysis.
Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week; we will meet next week.
As of Monday, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r3p2. Here are the differences from v9r3p1; see also Jim's notes in the Likelihood section below.
Data products: No news about the proposed updates to the definitions of the contents of FT1 and contents of FT2. David has prepared a draft specification of the format of the livetime cubes (from gtltcube) for the FITS Format Definition document. These files have not actually had a lot of attention recently in terms of binning in inclination angle - sqrt(1-cos(theta)) - but they do the job.
Databases and related utilities
As of Wednesday this week, the problems with the event selection parameters of the headers of the FITS files produced by the Astro Data Server have been solved, although the DATASERV-97 issue had not yet been marked as resolved.
Regarding the GSSC server, Tom reports: "There was a bug that was preventing the server from executing queries after an ingest. Some of you may have noticed that when you sent queries and clicked on the results page it told you you were >15th in the queue and the estimated time was negative. That bug has now been fixed and things seems to be working fine."
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I fixed a bug in gtselect where it wrote the incorrect header keywords for TSTART and TSTOP. This affected the running of gtmktime on the resulting file.
- I added access to the Minuit and NewMinuit covariance matrix from pyLikelihood.
- I fixed the bug in the livetime calcuation in gtltcube where it mistakenly skipped the first relevant time interval.
- I tagged ST v9r3p2 on Monday. This includes these changes, except for the the gtltcube fix.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James are continuing work on gtptest.
David Smith this week posted some detailed comments on potential additional capabilities for the pulsar tools. My understanding from Masa is that the Chris is arranging a discussion this week at the GSSC about which of the proposed capabilities will be adopted for the Science Tools that the GSSC will support for the distribution to guest investigators.
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met again this week. This week's meeting included a presentation from Jean about representing uncertainties in spectral fits, and an update about the list of detectable sources in the obssim2 simulation. Toby gave an update on pointlike for detecting sources and Jean presented an investigation of improving the sensitivity of the mrfilter source detection algorithm by optimizing external quantities, such as the binning of the input maps.