Science Tools Working Group
Did not have a VRVS meeting this week. Dave Davis, James Peachey, Chris Shrader, Tom Stephens, and Eric Winter are visiting SLAC from GSSC, and Toby Burnett was at SLAC on Wednesday. Discussions will continue through the day on Thursday. The discussion topics and approximate schedule are here. As of Thursday morning, we are somewhat ahead of schedule, although today we add one or two topics not on the posted agenda, like a discussion about ISOC operations tools and the coming ISOC workshop.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r0p3. See what is different from v8r0p2. The updates from v8r0p2 include some related to the PSF normalization and the default behavior of makeFT1 that Jim described in his presentation at Monday's C&A meeting.
Data products: See the comments from David Band, Anders Borgland, Jonathan Ormes, and Tom Stephens on the issues that I had posted for the pointing and livetime history.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. See the release notes diff linked above to read about the update to gtfindsrc in the current version of the Science Tools.
GRB tools
From James: "James P. worked with Eric Winter to check in and tag a new evtbin that contains the test data they generated previously."
Pulsar tools
From James: "James P. and Masa added the capability to the periodSearch package to write detailed search output into a FITS output file similar to that produced by the Xronos/Ftool powspec. They added this capability to gtpspec and gtpsearch as well as to the periodSearch unit test code." I haven't asked what 'detailed' means, and I'm not familiar with powspec.
Observation simulation
Max is working on a new fix to the problem of PulsarSpectrum sometimes wanting to look outside the time range of an FT2 file - owing to the nature of barycenter decorrection, PulsarSpectrum could want to look forwards (or backward) in time by up to the ~9 minute Sun-earth light travel time. His former method for trapping the error condition of trying to look outside the time range for which the FT2 file was defined broke when the format of the error string from the astro package was changed. Max needed a way to determine (in the code) the start and end times of the FT2 file, and to make it robust against the use of the start_time parameter; Jim has suggested a way to do this.
Richard has realized that his microQuasar source needs 'persistency' in the definitions of its outbursts if a simulation is divided into more than one time range, as it is for the long Service Challenge simulations. The symptom was that some of the microquasar sources did not look like they should have in the recent SC simulation.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.