Science Tools Working Group
Met this week.
Since Sunday, the current version of ScienceTools is v9r2p1. Here are the differences from v9r2. Jim fixed a problem in makeFT1 and Navid has made some updates in the facilities package.
Chris confirmed yesterday that the GLAST Users Committee has agreed to paricipate in a 'beta test' of the Science Tools, starting in mid-December and running for 6 weeks. Chris and the GSSC also hope to recruit some HEASARC people and I think also LAT people to participate. Looking ahead to the beta test, Chris is organizing a review of documentation of the tools (reference pages, tutorials, and Cicerone) and Analia has been working on filling in some topics in the latter. Chris and the GSSC will produce a template for more-detailed documentation of the tools in the Reference Pages section of the Workbook.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
Not sure where this belongs - Igor and Troy joined the Science Tools meeting this week to describe the developments they have in mind to support all-sky model fitting (likelihood analysis). gtlike cannot make all-sky convolutions accurately and for some very important applications, like tuning parameters of GALPROP there's no substitute for fitting the whole sky. Their first efforts, with Gulli J., will be to add a HEALPix binning capability to gtbin. They are also finding/implementing HEALPix convolution algorithms for fast all-sky convolutions with LAT PSFs. Jim has discussed with Gulli moving the convolution aspects of Likelihood into its own package; HEALPix-based convolutions could be used to advantage by gtlike and other Science Tools and there's some hope that we'll get there.
GRB tools
No development news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that barycentering on the fly is implemented in the HEAD version of the Science Tools, but the needed changes to the parameter files are still coming along.
Observation simulation
No direct news. Nicola fixed a problem in GRBobsmanager last week related to what happens during initialization if a GRB happens to be in progress at the start of a run. The symptom had been that the starting time for the run got reset back to the start of the GRB.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James described work on porting the Science Tools to build under Windows at the GSSSC/HEASARC, his plan of approach was modified. Jim suggested that rather than work on getting the hmake system to make Visual Studio files, the Windows versions just be built to use Cygwin. That route was rejected by HEASARC some time ago but apparently use of Cygwin has worked itself into HEASARC-supported software. It sounds like James will pursue the Cygwin approach. Eric W. has got the Linux builds with hmake almost working.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week. In the meantime, Jean is collecting results from analysis of obssim2 data using the source detection algorithms that are under study.