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(D. Band 4/6/07) First, is this an ICD/FFD issue, given that every row provides the start and stop time? Second, I think it makes sense to increase the time resolution when necessary--perhaps we should establish an angular change criterion?
(J. Chiang 4/23/07) We need to establish a maximum time interval size to facilitate the reading of the FT2 files by our various tools. For GRB analysis, the burst duration may be much less than 30 seconds (or whatever the nominal time interval is) and if one uses the extended filename syntax to filter on FT2 data using the inferred burst time boundaries, (tmin, tmax), using a filter string "(START >= tstart) && (STOP <= tstop)", and if those boundaries lie entirely within a time interval, this filter string will return zero intervals. To guard against this we would need to do something like "(START >= tstart) && (STOP <= tstop+maxIntervalSize)".
2. DEADTIME column
(Digel) For reasons that I no longer recall, we originally decided to keep track of both accumulated livetime (in each 30 second interval) and accumulated deadtime (since the start of the mission). The Science Tools do not use the DEADTIME column and makeFT2 assigns the value 1-LIVETIME to the column anyway.
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