Science Tools Working Group
Have not met for 3 weeks; most likely we will meet on August 9. Science tools development news is scant this week.
The current version of the Science Tools remains v7r4.
Data products: Jim implemented the MJDREF change described last week for FT1. He pointed out to me that this did not break gtbary (based on the code for the Chandra tool axbary) because internally it already checked for MJDREFI and MJDREFF keywords. gtpsearch may be broken by this change, but in general the tools seem remarkably insensitive to the disappearance of MJDREF. Jim also implemented other keywords that the HEASARC via David asked be included, among them redundant specification of the OBSERVER keywords; see this JIRA issue.
On Wednesday, David posted an updated definition version of the File Format Definitions for the Science Data Products that includes the additions and changes to FT1. FT2 is probably the next target for detailed scrutiny. David is soliciting comments on the data product definitions in general. Detailed-oriented good citizens are needed.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
No news.
GRB tools
No news, and I'm afraid no update on the IRF normalization/gtrspgen issue reported by James a couple of weeks ago; James is away this week.
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Last week James and I finished converting all pulsar tools to use new time-handling classes. The latest tagged versions of the pulsar tools are now with the new infrastructure, yet their functionality didn't change since the latest release of Science Tools (although there are some minor differences in output message, etc.)."
"The plan is to implement new features (such as allowing a user to specify an epoch in MJD) based on this version."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure
From Jim: "I have started using Navid's pattern in STpolicy v1r2 for creating a central pfiles directory for all of the gt tools. This is in ST HEAD and will be a part of ST v7r4p1." This is the functionality that users of the DC2 distributions enjoyed. It also prevents needing enormously (or impossibly) long PFILES environment variables.
Source Catalog
The catalog group met this week. Jean presented results on catalog analysis of the DC2 data using only the >100 MeV range; more sources than I would have expected were lost this way. We also discussed test files for source detection algorithms, and what would be a sensible agenda for the catalog session at the collaboration meeting.