Science Tools Working Group
Met this week. We'll meet again in 2 weeks.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v7r6p1.
Data products: The 3 LAT science data products that are being removed from the ICD (by agreement with the GSSC) are: LS-003, LS-006, and LS-007. There, now you know. See the Science Tools meeting page for a link to details. Livetime cubes are being added as a data product, meaning something that will be delivered by the ISOC to the GSSC. What to do about codifying the formats of the various products anticipated from Automated Science Processing in the ISOC remains to be determined.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim is implementing a hierarchical summing scheme for adding together the (mostly very small and numerous) terms of the likelihood function. As Andy Strong has demonstrated, being careful about the additions can prevent accumulation of tiny round-off biases and make enough of a difference to the log(likelihood) to worthwhile.
GRB tools
No news about LAT tools. David mentioned that the GBM team is behind where they had hoped to be at this point in terms of having a tool to generate accurate response matrices for GBM data analysis. The tool in the works will include effects from scattering off the LAT and off the upper atmosphere. They'll have this worked out before launch, for sure.
Pulsar tools
Masa and James are continuing to work on the blind search tool (gtpspec, which lives in the periodSearch package). It has been run on simple test data sets so far.
Observation simulation
From Max R.: "I have made a new tag (v2r2) of PulsarSpectrum which contains the binary demodulations. Now there is a flag for wiritng out the binary demodulation and barycentric corrections for every pulsar, but for the runs i can switch this option off. The pulsar for test is called PSRMUROB.
I will prepare another tag with the inclusion of Timing noise, since I would like to do after binaries are ok. I will begin to send some new pulsars for the runs once this second upgrade is finished."
He has been able to reproduce the problem we have had running the SC1 sky model that used to work and expects to be able to track it down shortly.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James described what should be different from the Science Tool user's perspective when APE is substituted for PIL behind HOOPs. Basically, the annoying aspects of PIL, some of which are captured in JIRA issues, should go away and some new functionality will be available, e.g., related to variable substitution. He may (somehow) make a transition version of HOOPs that has a switch to select APE or PIL.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.