Science Tools Working Group
We will have a meeting this week (tomorrow). The topics will include a recap of the feedback to the GSSC from the GLAST Users Group from their 'beta test' of the Science Tools.
Since May 15 the current release version of the Science Tools is v9r5p4. Here are the changes since v9r5p3. It has several behind-the-scenes changes that you should not notice plus a couple of small changes that you might. See below
Data products: No news
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "We are still working on time handling classes." This is toward the end of handling multiple timing models for binary pulsars
Observation simulation
Jim diagnosed an odd problem with the 'obssim3' simulations of the Big Run sky model as result from the microQuasar source reseting the random number seed. The symptom was that changing the seed given to gtobssim had no effect on the sequence of events that was output. Richard has fixed microQuasar to no longer do this, but the change is not yet in a release of the Science Tools.
For long gtobssim runs (of order 1 year) with a "complete" sky model (e.g., obssim3), we still encounter duplicate event times, probably owing to the intrinsic single precision of the random number generators we are using. See the discussion from obssim 1. As per Toby's suggestion, we have implemented a 26 micro second deadtime: photons with arrival times within this window relative to the previous photon will be discarded. This should result in a loss of a few hundred photons over the course of a year. observationSim v8r1p2, for now still only in ST LATEST.
Max's recent additions of environment variables to control the writing of log files by PulsarSpectrum is in v9r5p4 of the Science Tools; I don't know any more details at this point. Presumably Max also is working on updating the documentation in the User Workbook.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Toby's update to the astro package - mentioned in last week's report, is in the v9r5p4 release. It makes the code more flexible regarding what orders of magnitude to expect for the spacecraft position information.
Source Catalog
Met last week. The technical topics included a presentation by Markus on initial work on a tool to fit extended sources. Toby gave a presentation about unbinned vs. binned spectral fits.