Science Tools Working Group
We met yesterday and most likely will next meet in 2 weeks.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v7r4p1. The next release will be at the end of the current 6-week build cycle, Oct. 13
Data products: No news. The status of the Science Data Products ICD was on the agenda for the Operations Technical Interchange Meeting held at Goddard this week. Julie is going to give a recap of this session at the Science Ops EVO Meetings tomorrow.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim has made gtcntsmap able to interpret energy bin definition files written by gtbindef so that it can make counts maps for specific user-specified energy ranges. The Diffuse group wants this functionality in order to make EGRET-like counts maps.
Jim has made gtlivetimecube run faster now for the case where a long pointing history file is provided as input but only a small part of the time range is actually requested.
Also, Jim has got gtmodelmap writing a non-empty GTI extension - it copies the GTI of the input counts file.
GRB tools
David described the functionality of gtburstfit. It is not a temporal-spectral model fitter but finds and fits temporal profiles of GRBs using binned data as input. Jeff Scargle apparently has figured out how to make it work with unbinned LAT data, too, but that is not yet implemented in the tool.
James is reworking gtrspgen to have it make interpolations, integrations, etc. over the response functions using cos(inclination angle) rather than just the inclination angle. This will make it consistent with how the response functions are handled, e.g., by gtlikelihood, and apparently will fix the discrepancies noted between Xspec and gtlikelihood analyses.
Pulsar tools
No news about the tools. Masa has updated the tutorials for the pulsar tools to be consistent with the new functionality of the user interface
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure
Toby gave a presentation (linked to the agenda page for the Science Tools meeting) summarizing how the IRFs have been defined from AllGamma data and specifications of event classification cuts, and described his proposal for how the process of producing the IRFs can be more streamlined. The IRF group, originally constituted for DC2, is being reformed (again chaired by Jim), as may already have been reported.
Jim reminded us that David has pointed out that the DATE-OBS and DATE-END time strings in our FITS files should be in the TT time system, to be consistent with the FITS convention. This is not a big deal but not something that can be done currently with the time handling classes in the astro package, which do not know about leap seconds. Toby is willing to work on this and David, Jim, Toby, me, and anyone else who is interested (let me know) will work out what specifically needs to be implemented.
David led a brief discussion about the desirability of making more of the science tools (optionally) produce graphical output. We were more time ocnstrained than usual during the meeting and will have to get back to this topic.
David is updating the Cicerone with input from Chris Shrader and Analia.
Source Catalog
The catalog group did not meet this week.