March 4, 2008: Here is version 3 of the "GLAST LAT Memo of Understanding of a Pulsar Timing Consortium" which was circulated to the people listed on page 6 of the document on February 23rd. Here is Changes3to4.txt which is some modifications that were suggested by LAT leadership in a telecon a few days after that. Since then there has been considerable discussion resulting in a finite list of changes likely to be made in the next week or so: to cite two -- Mallory Roberts lead a series of e-mail exchanges ; and Scott Ransom lead a discussion of the topic at the Glast User's Group meeting yesterday. Several pulsar PI's have agreed to sign the document in more or less its present form.
A little background -- without going back to 2001 or 2002 when the LAT team and pulsar scientists laid the groundwork for all this, and without going back to a splinter session on the topic held at the IAU general assembly in Prague in the summer of 2006, I'll just say that on February 6th I (= David Smith) circulated a draft of an A&A article called "Pulsar Timing for the GLAST LAT". It describes the science motivation for gamma ray pulsars and the need for a sustained timing campaign to achieve that science. It lists 231 gamma pulsar candidates (Edot > 1E34 erg/s) that Simon Johnston has argued should be 225. About half of the article is tests of the LAT pulsar "Science Tools" software applied to various data sets. We (= a few senior LAT and pulsar people) built an author list of pulsar timers and LAT people. We suggested that agreeing to sign the A&A would amount to committing to the "timing consortium" the rules of which were only roughly described. By wide acclaim, we quickly separated that particular paper from the consortium constitution, and the MoU was born. Achieving consensus on its contents took the rest of February and has bled into March.
I'm uneasy about posting a multi-author draft of an A&A on a public web site while corrections are still in progress. Contact me if you want to see it (me = smith@cenbg.in2p3.fr).
January 2008: VERITAS held a collaboration meeting in Tuscon last month. They asked John Millis of Purdue University to be the point-of-contact to the LAT collaboration for timing ephemerides. John is a graduate student working with John Finley. The e-mail address is john.millis@gmail.com . Millis and Bordeaux have begun exchanging file formats and a few selected timing solutions.
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