Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r1. Here are the differences from v8r0p4. This includes a number of mostly small updates from the previous release - some of which are mentioned below. This will be the last incremental release before v9, which as reported last week will include the Proposed Tool Name Changes and the deletion of the no-longer-needed gtcntsmap.
Ideally, v9 will also include updates to the names of parameters. Dave Davis has compiled a list of recommended changes - to a more uniform set across the tools and overall more consistent with general usage for FTOOLS for other missions in the HEASARC archive. These are bigger changes in terms of the code than the tool names. The proposed changes are now open for a (brief) comment period.
Changing names of tools and parameters will be inconvenient to existing users, and there's never a good time. Sooner is the least worst option (and we don't expect to do this again). I hope to figure out today how realistic going to v9 will be in the near term with the new parameter names incorporated. If we cannot get these changes in soon, then we'll need to hold off while the obssim2 data set (and possibly its successors) enjoys its heyday.
The GLAST Users Group (formerly GUC) met this week at Goddard; some of the presentations that they were shown are available online. Chris Shrader described the status of the GSSC, including the Science Tools. He reports that the GUG agreed that the first GSSC distribution of the science tools (to the world at large) should be at Launch + LEO + 6 months.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim: "Responding to Jean's problems with analyzing front-only events using handoff response, I added the HANDOFF_front and HANDOFF_back combinations to those available from the IRFs loading software. To use these one would do, e.g., gtdiffrsp rspfunc=HANDOFF_front" [gtdiffrsp being the v9 name of gtdiffresp]
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James have done some bug fixing and continue to work on sorting out the code of gtpsearch for barycentering-on-the-fly.
Marcus Ziegler is starting to make a Science Tools version of the pulsar search with time differences algorithm. See Atwood et al. (2006).
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Met this week. The agenda included a variety of topics. Some further studies of likelihood analysis (including confidence regions reported by gtfindsrc) were presented, along with investigations of source detection in the Catalog pipeline and with the new 'test pattern' data sets.