Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r2. This has the fix to the Likelihood bug in handling the HANDOFF response functions that was described last week. It also fixes the EVENT_CLASS numbering of the front and back HANDOFF response functions to be 0 and 1, respectively, as they are for other response functions.
This means that v8r2 cannot be used for likelihood analysis with any already-generated gtobssim data set that you have using the HANDOFF response functions. This includes the obssim2 data set. Nicola has reprocessed it - fixing the EVENT_CLASS settings and regenerating the diffuse responses. We have learned of a small bug in how the TSTART/TSTOP keywords are set in some of the daily files in the obssim2 dataset. The bug is of no consequence (that I'm aware of) for any Science Tools analysis but would at least have caused the files to fail the ingest checks at the GSSC if Tom had not already had to disable them to accept the daily files that we sent him. So we are considering what to do, and if you want to know the details I'll tell you. We'll figure out what to do soon, so we can get the reprocessed obssim2 data into the servers.
Today at Harvard, David Band is describing the analysis tools at a Getting Involved with GLAST workshop.
Regarding the GLAST Users Group meeting reported on last week, they GUG plans to have another 'beta test' of the Science Tools, sometime September-November.
Data products: No news
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
No news but see utilities and Catalog news below.
GRB tools
James reports fixing a problem with the unit test in the rspgen package
Pulsar tools
From James: "James and Masa continued refactoring gtpsearch. During this period, they concentrated on rationalizing the application code with an eventual view of handling barycentering on-the-fly. They continued breaking the
application into pieces using helper methods in the application class. These helper methods are streamlining the flow of the main gtpsearch application, and in the future will allow gtpspec and other pulsar tools to take advantage of the periodSearch application classes.
James also reports fixing build problems in the periodSearch package.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim: "gtmktime [future name for gtmaketime] has been optimized and showed a factor of 50 speedup for a 10^7 s gtobssim simulation with standard orbit and rocking. gtmktime does not modify TSTART or TSTOP or other date keywords.
gtselect can now accept a list of FT1 files. Non-GTI keywords are compared for consistency, but GTIs are not examined, so one can have overlapping GTIs (and potentially multiply-included events); and the GTIs are merged without discretion. gtselect ensures that the TSTART, TSTOP, and date-related keywords are synched up to the user's
selections in all HDUs."
The above modifications mean that the GTI bounds will not necessarily correspond to the TSTART & TSTOP values.
Source Catalog
Met this week. Jean reported that a preliminary catalog for obssim2 is ready - ancillary information like light curves and fluxes in different bands will come later but the numbers of sources should not change. He has provided it to Tom for posting at the GSSC and will make an announcement in the SC Users Forum when it is ready. the catalog analysis relied on binned likelihood and so was not affected by the swap of front and back HANDOFF response functions.
Other topics included presentations on source localization (by Toby and Vincent), an update on MR_FILTER's performance on 'test patterns' (Ludovic) and some discussion about the contents of the obssim2 source list.