Preamble

• Before the first year on orbit, we wrote a Pulsar Timing Consortium Memo of Understandingfor sustained timing of known pulsars with Edot > 1E34 erg/s. This acquired two appendices:

1. to add the radio observatory at Urumqi in China
2. to add Ben Stappers to the list, after he moved to the U. of Manchester and took on Jodrell Bank duties from Lyne & Kramer.

• During the first year, Paul Ray put together a Pulsar Search Consortium (=PSC), described in this document.
• These documents expired at the end of Year 1. The purpose of this page is to update them.

Our intent is to merge the "Consortium" and the "PSC" into one single body, if practical.

Two broad issues need to be addressed --

1. Observation strategies
2. Publication policy

Observation strategies

We'll consider two aspects separately --

1. Monitoring of known radio (and X-ray) pulsars.
2. Follow-ups of LAT sources (blind search pulsars, and unidentified DC sources)

( Only 5 X-ray pulsars are covered by the original MoU and involve a small number of people (2 at McGill, 1 at GSFC, 1 at Columbia). We'll deal with these individually once we've covered the thornier issues. )

Monitoring of known radio pulsars

The situation is shaping up nicely. Here is a message I sent to Simon Johnston:

{{Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:27:40 +0200 (CEST)
From: D.A. Smith <smith@cenbg.in2p3.fr>
To: simon.johnston@atnf.csiro.au
Subject: radio timing after Lucas, Damien, Patrick...

Life after Lucas, Damien, Patrick doesn't seem too grim to me.

Damien is not a .par producer, only a user. He'll be a postdoc in the group with Paul Ray at NRL and will continue
doing alot of what he's been doing. (He wants to learn how to build LAT .par's with Paul!).

Lucas will continue building Nancay .par's from Bonn. What's better is that he'll be sitting near Aris, who has been
doing them for Jodrell! Lucas' dream is that he and Aris combine TOA's and share the work load.

Patrick is now part of the Jodrell effort. Could Patrick continue to build .pars for Parkes? Maybe not. Could Patrick
dump Parkes TOAs on Aris and Lucas, for them to include in the .par fabrication machine? Maybe.

So that leaves two big Parkes tasks in the lurch:
i) actually driving out to telescope and staying up all night ;
ii) reducing Parkes raw data to TOAs that could be fed to Lucas and Aris

Certainly Lucas is very enthusiastic about the idea we discussed on the phone last time, that he come to Sydney for a
month, to observe and to learn more of the radio trade. Michael K certainly wants Lucas to become a "real" radio
astronomer. So... Lucas can chip into (ii) once he returns from Australia, in <6 months maybe.

For , you said that you would offload your northern Fermi targets (to the friends mentioned above!) and then
spread the remainder amongst other Parkes observing campaigns, such that you'd end up with one night every three
months instead of two nights every month.}}

Simon and me e-mail exchange. Get Michael on board. Americans not timing large numbers anyway. Basically only the six at GBT. We certainly want Fernando to keep pounding away at PSR J1930+1852 (the only one of the six that we haven't yet seen in gamma-rays) as well as any others he wants to do with us (e.g. PSR J1935+2025 that is a good candidate but not covered by the MoU).

lucas and bdx database -- single point failure? no... dave s is point of contact, what counts is the .par's, so an nrl mirror not a good idea