Science Tools Working Group
The current release version (since November 1) of the Science Tools is now v9r8p2. This includes a number of mostly-small updates from v9r8p1. As Dave Davis wrote in a note to scisoftlist on Oct. 16, according to the freeze and testing plan at the FSSC, v9r8p2 is the target version for public release in February. (Keep in mind that the FSSC will not be releasing all of the packages that are built with Science Tools; the list is in the ST_dist package.)
Data products: The proposed update to the Science Data Products File Format Document for the changes to FT2 (LS-005) has been incorporated by David B. in the next revision of the document. Andrea has developed a version of ft2Util to support generating updated FT2 files. A plan for regenerating FT2 files with this format, and delivering them to the FSSC in concert with switching over to the new version of ft2Util in L1Proc needs to be settled on.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
In the current release Jim has added an option to choose relative or absolute convergence tolerance in gtlike. This functionality still needs to be propagated to gttsmap and gtfindsrc.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "In the pulsar tools development, the pulsar tools were made ready for the public release after bug fixes and minor improvements, and are included in ScienceTools v9r8p2. I will be updating the Workbook to match the versions of the pulsar tools in this package."
Observation simulation
John V. is planning to assemble a complete set of example files for the various inputs to gtorbsim. These will be primarily for testing purposes, but will be made available to us and (I think) integrated with the documentation for the tool.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Toby has updated the astro package to account for the leap second that happened at the end of 2005 and to handle the one that is planned for the end of 2008. The most noticeable aspect of this may be in the DATE-OBS and DATE-END strings in the headers of FT1 and FT2 files. These are the human-readable dates that until now have been 1 second off.
Source Catalog
The Catalog group met last week; Toby described enhancements to pointlike "to use the normalization of the background as an independent estimator of the fraction of observed events in the ROI that are not background". Catalog pipeline analysis of the September data and studies of associations with September sources were also discussed.