Science Tools Working Group
No meeting again this week. There's not a lot of news to report.
Since July 26 current release version of the Science Tools is v9r7. Here are the differences from v9r6p3. Most of the updates relate to facilitating porting the tools to the hmake build environment that will be used at GSSC, which also entails making the code buildable on a wider variety of systems. Eric W. determined the needed changes and posted them as JIRA issues for the respective package owners. These should be transparent to users of the Science Tools. Toby and Marshal have extensively updated the skymaps and pointlike packages; from the release notes I get the impression that the functionality has not changed.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reminds us of an issue that I think Jim originally pointed out regarding barycenter arrival time corrections; gtbary changes every time-related quantity in the files that it processes. As a result, likelihood analyses of phase-selected photons can give noticeably-incorrect results because the event times no longer correspond to the correct part of the pointing history file. Masa originally proposed eliminating gtbary, since the pulsar tools can generate and apply barycenter arrival time corrections on the fly. However, enough users depend on barycenter arrival time corrections that eliminating gtbary does not look useful. I think that Masa is working on a way that gtbary can indicate in a FITS file whether the times have been corrected
Observation simulation
Max R. has updated the PulsarSpectrum package in response to a couple of needed tweks
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met last week and will meet tomorrow. Issues in source associations (with members of other catalogs) were discussed last week