Science Tools Working Group

Our last meeting was February 13. We will get back in the saddle next week.

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r4p2. This is the version that the Glast Users Group will use for the Beta Test; the GSSC was due to release builds yesterday.

Jim and Toby will led a splinter session last week at the collaboration meeting on 'Extending Science Tools'. This spurred some interesting (to some) discussion about what is a Science Tool.

The ground system software freeze started on March 17. The mission-level Freeze Plan is not accessible to most people. Neither is the presentation that Rob gave to the GLAST Project Office last week regarding the ISOC software (including by reference Science Tools). You can see the SAS-SO CCB page, which has what we are currently working to. My understanding is that for Science Tools this directly affects only the tools used by ASP and that development and releases of Science Tools can continue. The question of when and how to control the analysis tools, like the Standard Analysis Environment tools that the GSSC will support is, to my knowledge, still open. (For ASP-related tools 'freeze' means that changes in the versions of any of the code to be run in the pipeline must be approved by a SAS-SO CCB, a LAT CCB, and the mission level Change Authorization Board.)

Data products: Andrea added the orientation quaternion to the FT2 files. Jim modified makeFT2[a] and gtobssim to fill these values in the files they produce. This is not currently used by any of the science tools but has been discussed as potentially useful for users of this data product. In the next release of Science Tools,

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news. See note about ModelEditor below.

GRB tools

No news.

Pulsar tools

Masa and James are continuing to work on implementing handling of ephemeris handling for alternate sets of timing parameters for binary pulsars.

Observation simulation

From Jim: "option added to run gtobssim "without" IRFs:

gtobssim irfs=none

This will allow all incident within a 1 m^2 encircling sphere to be accepted, i.e., a flat effective area as a function of energy. The incident directions and energies are preserved. i.e., PSF and energy dispersion are not applied (observationSim v8)"

Also, my understanding is that Eric W. has completed an updated version of ModelEditor that uses ROOT GUIs and can translate between source simulation and analysis (Likelihood) model specifications. This is not in our repository yet.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

From Jim: "gtselect:

  • allow cut on PULSE_PHASE (phasemin, phasemax) (dataSubselector v5r7)
  • disabled/removed cuts that are not supported for use with downstream
    tools (dataSubselector v6 pending):
    • longitude and latitude ranges,
    • inclination (theta) and azimuth (phi) in instrument coordinates
  • redesign cuts on event class and conversion type for new implementation
    of event class designations in FT1 and IRFs (dataSubselector v6 pending)"

Regarding the last bullet - stay tuned for more details.

Source Catalog

Will meet tomorrow. For the most recent news, see the presentations in the Catalog + Diffuse plenary session at last week's collaboration meeting.

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