Science Tools Update, October 21, 2008

Science Tools Working Group

The current release version of the Science Tools is now v9r8. Here is the list from the Release Manager of the differences.

We had a Science Tools meeting last Wednesday (11 attendees). Much of the discussion was about how to make relevant parts of the User Workbook documentation available to guest investigators next year via the FSSC, while keeping the documentation in synch. The freeze/test/release plan for the Science Tools to be released by the FSSC was also discusssed. Basically, the freeze will be the end of this month; Dave Davis sent a schedule for what happens next to scisoftlist.

Data products: Regarding the planned additions to FT2 contents, Andrea has modified ft2util to provide the new columns. The new version is being tested.

Databases and related utilities

No news.

Likelihood analysis

No specific news, although you will be reminded from the RM link above that a number of useful updates have accumulated since the last release.

You will notice that in v9r8 gtselect now prompts for a zenith angle limit. Providing one is a good idea even if you are analyzing only survey-mode data, especially because sun avoidance and other maneuvers can bring the horizon into the FOV even during these times. Currently 105 deg is commonly used. If you don't want to make a cut on zenith angle, specify the limit as 180 deg.

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

The new release incorporates all of the various updates that have been described in these reports over the last couple of months.

Masa has noticed a bug in gtbary in the new release; see the details in his posting PULS-49. Under certain circumstances, gtbary ignores (and does not report) errors in computing geocentric and barycentric times. The outputs are correct if the inputs are correct, but if you run gtbary as a standalone tool you don't get any warnings if you come up against this bug.

Masa reports that this does not affect any of the other pulsar tools. The current workaround for gtbary is to continue to use the v9r7p1 version [or live dangerously].

Observation simulation

Reminder: Jim has updated gtobssim to allow it to process merged flight FT2 files. This is a great convenience for simulating as-flown pointing and livetime histories; formerly the gaps between the runs required simulations to be made run-by-run and then merged. See the Science Tools Update for October 14.

STOP PRESS There was a logic error in the code introduced in observationSim v8r2 to compute livetime information for merged FT2 files. See obs-13@jira. This is fixed in observationSim v8r3.

In v9r8 the gtorbsim tool is now the orbit/attitude simulator that derives from the Tako planning system in the FSSC. The simulation is somewhat idealized but it can make, e.g., pointed observations with earth avoidance and survey-mode observations with a user-specified rocking profile. The inputs are described in the User Workbook, although we do not have examples yet of all of the input files. The simulator was written by Giuseppe Romeo, and it is currently supported by John Vernaleo; Analia Cillis wrote the documentation.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)