Blog

Science Tools Working Group

We won't have a meeting this week this week either; there's not a lot of new news and the Catalog group will be putting the time slot to good use.

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r5p2. Jim has made preliminary versions of the Pass 6 IRFs available in the LATEST builds of Science Tools (1.2334 and later); see his news item.

Data products: Examples of all of the LAT Science Data Products have been produced, sent via FastCopy to the GSSC, and accepted by the ingest system there. Don Horner patiently reviewed iterations of the various attempted deliveries. David Band patiently updated the File Format Document (Rev A) as circumstances required. The GSSC and ISOC were able to sign off on the delivery requirements for these.

The LAT source catalog (LS-008) needed the most adjustments to the specification of the format - mostly small, but some omissions were found. Jean has produced a summary page of the format, with a couple of proposed tweaks to the current format; these will be discussed at a future Catalog meeting.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

No news

Observation simulation

No direct news. Max is adding or updating environment variable definitions to control the output of log files by PulsarSpectrum

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

No direct news. In the LATEST builds the versions of tip and hoops have been incremented by James. These have not been propopagated to releases yet, and so are presumably still being worked on.

Source Catalog

Met last week. Ludovic and Jean presented some results on Nicola's test gtobssim run of the Big Run sky model (Pass 5 Transient). Some words were said about the status of making resampled backgrounds for Science Tools analyses. Toby briefly introduced spectral fits in pointlike, including how the spectra may be stored.

Science Tools Working Group

We probably won't have a meeting this week.

Since Monday, the current version of the Science Tools v9r5p2. Here are the differences from v9r5p1. The most important change is including the pgwave package, which is used in the Catalog pipeline.

Data products: Examples of all of the LAT Science Data Products have been evaluated by the ingest system at the GSSC and the higher-level (post-L1 pipeline) products have been found to be wanting in various ways, mostly owing to omissions of some header keywords and lack of checksum and/or datasum calculations. These will be addressed to allow associated requirements to be signed off at the ISOC and the GSSC.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

Masa and James have started coding to allow multiple binary timing models in the pulsar tools.

Observation simulation

No news

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Jim added a kludge to the irfs package to allow the old HANDOFF response functions to still be recognized. This was needed because the Catalog group in particular is still working with the obssim2 (SC2) data set, but otherwise these response functions are only of historical interest, and in fact soon will be donated to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Johann made minor changes to several packages to make them able to compile on 64-bit computers; the need for these changes was discovered by Bryan Irby in porting the Science Tools to the hmake system at the GSSC.

Source Catalog

Met last week for a discussion about source identification/counterpart assignment. The meeting was nearly foiled by EVO problems; the cross-group strategies are available for comment - now's the time.

Science Tools Working Group

We'll skip having a meeting this week; the time slot will be used for a session on source identification convened by the Catalog group.

Since last Thursday, the current version of the Science Tools v9r5p1. Here are the differences from v9r5. The most important changes relate to IRFs; see below.

If you weren't one of the 46 people in the C&A meeting on Monday, you might want to check out Toby and Matthew's presentations yesterday on spectral analysis PointLike.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

Jim's implementation of calculation of TS for diffuse sources in pyLikelihood, mentioned last week, is in v9r5p1

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

Masa and James expect to start coding this week to allow multiple binary timing models in the pulsar tools.

Observation simulation

No news

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

See Jim's note to irflist regarding the updates to IRF-related packages in v9r5p1. Riccardo's presentation in the C&A meeting yesterday provides a synopsis.

Here are the IRF sets that gtirfs reports are available in v9r5p1:

Older IRFs (DC2, DC1, et al.) are still available and can be viewed by doing

gtirfs chatter=3

From Eric W.: "The ScienceTools tarball distributed by the GSSC is in beta test now. We have also prepared a second tarball with the GSSC version of the ModelEditor. The latter has not been touched for many months, so I expect it will get some tweaking over the next few weeks. The GSSC-distributed tarball is now supported on 32- and 64-bit Linux, and OS X 10.4 on Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs."

Source Catalog

Met last week. The multi-band method that Jean and Ludovic have implemented for MRfilter have made it (currently) the best-performing source detection algorithm. The same approach will likely improve the performance of PGWave as well. UW pointfind (which inspired the mult-band approach) is not far behind and has a performance advantage in the vicinity of bright sources. Toby described the new command-line interface for pointfit. We also discussed the current state of using the Big Run backgrounds to make resampled (Pass 5) backgrounds for gtobssim simulations.

Science Tools Working Group

We met last week (10 attendees) and probably will meet next week.

The current version of the Science Tools is v9r5. As of Friday, Navid made the standard builds available via the installer.

If you weren't one of the 55 people in the C&A meeting on Monday, you might want to check out the presentations on aspects of spectral analysis.

You might also be interested in the plans regarding Data Quality Flags that Anders prepared for last week's SO meeting but will give this week.

Data products: No news. Runs for the record in terms of delivering examples of all of the LAT science data products to the GSSC are being orchestrated for requirements sign off.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

From Jim: "I've enabled TS calculations for diffuse sources in pyLikelihood. This was disabled by default for gtlike since TS is computed automatically for all point sources in the model, and it doesn't really make sense to do this for the Galactic and extragalactic components, which can only be excluded reliably by the fact that they are "Diffuse" sources, so all diffuse sources are excluded in gtlike. For pyLikelihood, users have to actively request for a TS, so there is no unwanted/unnecessary computational burden if it can be done for diffuse sources. This is still in pyLikelihood HEAD."

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

As of last week the infrastructure of the pulsar tools was almost ready to accept new timing models for binary pulsars. From Masa: "Nothing special in the pulsar tools development since the last Wednesday. James and I will detail the development plan (and hopefully start working on it) this week."

See discussion in JIRA (GRINF-38) regarding whether to add a column in FT1 recording the amount of time that the space craft has been out of GPS lock.

Observation simulation

No news

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

From Jim: "I've proposed to C&A (and Level-1 processing) that the FT1 cuts and event class definitions be moved from fitsGen to a package external to ST so that it can be under separate version control. See the discussion here. The new package is evtClassDefs." This factoring is important for separating software issues from cut definitions in terms of configuration control.

Pass 6 IRFs: Riccardo has checked his edisp changes. These need to be propagated to irfs/latResponse.

Eric W. has got v9r4p1 building under the HEASARC hmake system and has got 32-bit and 64-bit Linux and 10.4 OS X (Power PC and Intel) builds to prove it. These are being provided to participants in the GLAST Users Group Beta test. The builds for Mac OS X required a change in the configure script for building the CLHEP shared library. He can fill us (Navid) in if we will be making Mac OS X builds; and perhaps he already has.

Source Catalog

Did not meet last week.

Science Tools Working Group

We will meet tomorrow at the usual time.

As of last Friday, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r5. Toby noticed that the RM has not built all of the usual distributions - at least the Windows versions were not available as of Monday. Navid explained that the problem was lack of disk space on u09; he is working on it. Here are the differences from v9r4p2. The most important ones are probably in Event class handling in Likelihood - see below.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

Jim reports that Likelihood now uses the Event class handling scheme that he proposed. The changes are backwards compatible with existing FT1 files; new FT1 files will have the EVCLSVER keyword in the EVENTS extension header.

Jim also reports that he "modified gttsmap to use wcslib for defining the TS map coordinate system so that projections other than CAR can be given (Likelihood v13r14)."

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

From Masa: "the infrastructure to accept multiple ephemeris models is almost done, yet James and I still have to go through a couple of issues that need to be resolved."

Observation simulation

Jim is not planning to tag a new version of gtobssim that will implement the new event class handling scheme until versions of Pass 5 or Pass 6 IRFs compatible with the scheme are available. This would mean having a set for each value of CTBClassLevel (1, 2, 3), rather than sets for CTBClassLevel > 0, >1, and 3.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Jim has updated gtselect to allow selections by event class and conversion type (front/back) in the new classification scheme.

Source Catalog

Met last week. Tyrel presented an update on studying the use of 'event covariance' information in localization of sources. Jean presented a more detailed investigation of the detectable sources in the obssim2 data that were missed by one or another of the source detection algorithms. Ludovic presented improved sensitivity of the MRfilter method from adding a third (lower-energy) band, which helps find soft sources that had been missed bfofre

Science Tools Working Group

We met last week (attendees: D Band, T Stephens, R Dubois, J Chiang, D Davis, A Cillis, C Patterson, J Ballet, W Focke, J Conrad, T Burnett, D Sanchez, A Tramacere, B Giebels, E Winter, S Digel). We will meet next week at the usual time.

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r4p2.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

No news

Observation simulation

No direct news. David Sanchez has almost gotten gtorbsim (nee gttakosim) to run using example files provided some time ago by Giuseppe Romeo. David ran up against a bug regarding parameter handling; James suggested the following workaround for the file input approach to running the tool (while he fixes the bug): "the tool should work for you if you run it once with the command: gttakosim Timeline=. EphemName=. saafile=. "

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

At the Science Tools meeting last week, Jim described his proposal for Event Class Handling in the Science Tools in general and in FT1 files in particular. In the proposal he introduced the gtirfs tool.

Source Catalog

Met last week. The discussion was about source identification strategies, toward settling on a standard approach for the Catalog sources.

Science Tools Working Group

Our last meeting was February 13. We will meet tomorrow at the usual time.

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r4p2. This is the version that the Glast Users Group is using for the Beta Test. The Beta test is at least a month-long opportunity for GUG members to download the tools from the GSSC and analyze the LEO 55-day data set. Part of the test is evaluating the user support at the GSSC. We'll find out tomorrow how things are going.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news.

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. Masa: "It's been quite a while, but I can assure you that we are making a good progress."

Observation simulation

No direct news. To judge from LATEST builds, Richard recently updated the microQuasar source; documentation in the Workbook should be forthcoming.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Jim is updating how event class definitions will be handled in the Science Tools (and FT1 files). These will use the existing FT1 columns; possibly an additional keyword will need to be added to the headers.

Source Catalog

Met last week. Jean presented more details about the comparison of source detection algorithms that was shown at the collaboration meeting. Toby presented an investigation of the high-TS spurious sources that pointfind, well, finds. They are related to details of the iteration of source detection in the vicinity of bright sources. Dave T. talked about the re-arrangement of responsibilities between the Unidentified and Catalog groups that Peter announced.

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.

Science Tools Working Group

Our last meeting was February 13. Owing to travel and Ops Sim 2 and the Collaboration meeting, we will not meet again until mid March.

The current version of the Science Tools is v9r4p2. This is the version that the Glast Users Group will use for the Beta Test next month. The most important changes from v9r4p1 are bug fixes to gtsrcmaps and gtltcube. Here are all of the differences from v9r4p1.

Updated Pass 5 IRFs (corresponding to the data being processed for Ops Sim 2) are now available in Science Tools versions LATEST1.2248 and later (i.e., not yet in a release). Riccardo and Luigi generated the FITS files and Jim inserted them into CALDB. They are P5_v13_0_diff (and _source and _trans). See Jim's note.

Jim and Toby will lead a splinter session at the collaboration meeting on 'Extending Science Tools', for people with ideas and motivation (and skill) who would like to add new tools or new functionality to the Science Tools. The session is currently scheduled during the long lunch break on Wednesday, March 12.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

From Jim:

• bug-fix for gtsrcmaps in reading in scData files (v13r11p5)
• bug-fix for PowerLawSuperExpCutoff (submitted by Damien Parent, v13r11p4)
• made Gaussian quadrature integration of diffuse responses the default (v13r12)

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

Jim fixed a bug in the FileSpectrum source (that also affects FileSpectrumMap and RadialSource) regarding how the energies of generated photons are assigned. The bug had gone unnoticed since v7 of the Science Tools; the effect was fairly unsubtle but these sources have not been widely used in the sky models.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

No development news

For the Beta Test the GLAST Users Group members will be working from their home institutions, i.e., without direct hand holding from the GSSC. As reported last week, Analia Cillis at the GSSC has updated and extended the reference pages for the Science Tools. These will be made available in the User Workbook. She is also working on updating the tutorials.

Source Catalog

Met last week. Ludovic reported on improving the sensitivity of MR_filter for source detection. Jean reported further results on catalog analysis of time intervals containing pointed observations using the 55-day LEO data set and on the effects of bright, non-power-law sources on results for their surroundings. The former is an example of a strategy for analysis when the residual background cannot be considered negligible. Tyrel gave an update on his work to study the use of covariance information from Recon for improving the accuracy of source position assignments.

Science Tools Working Group

Our last meeting was February 13 (attendees J Chiang, S Digel, J Ballet, C Patterson, D Band, A Cillis, D Davis, E Winter, T Burnett, W Focke, N Giglietto, T Porter). We may not meet again until after the collaboration meeting.

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r4p1.

Data products: No news. David expects to be able to submit 'Rev A' of the File Formats Document before launch. This would incorporate various fixes (e.g., Andrea T. noticed that the current definition of LS-005 specifies a maximum altitude of 10,000 m for GLAST) and refinements.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

Jim fixed a bug in gtltcube that prevented it from correctly ingesting more than one spacecraft data file.

GRB tools

No LAT development news. David described discussions with Rob Preece about the GSSC providing an Web service for generating GBM response matrices. The GBM data will be released with response matrices but the service will allow updated matrices to be generated, e.g., if a better position is found for the burst.

Pulsar tools

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

Regarding populating D4, right now it looks like David Smith et al. at Bordeaux will be aggregating inputs from radio pulsar and X-ray pulsar timers into the ephemeris database file that the pulsar tools use and the GSSC will distribute. Not all of the details are worked out regarding making the ephemerides publicly available but pulsar group members are optimistic that something can be worked out. See Timing Database for GLAST LAT Pulsars.

Observation simulation

No news.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

No development news

Dave Davis and Analia have sent Chuck the updated and extended reference pages (equivalent to FTOOLS fhelp pages) for the Science Tools. These will make their way into the User Workbook, replacing the current reference pages.

Source Catalog

Did not meet last week.

Science Tools Working Group

Our last meeting was January 16. We probably will meet this week on Wednesday (tomorrow).

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r4p1.

Data products: No news as of this writing regarding the status of demonstrating to everyone's happiness the delivery of LS-001, LS-002, and LS-005 data products from the L1 pipeline to the GSSC.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

Jim resolved JIRA issue LK-40, responding to David Landriu's observation that changes to the selected optimizer in pyLikelihood was not updated in the information that is printed about the state of the program.

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

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

Observation simulation

No news. The GSSC has asked, and Jim has agreed, that gttakosim be renamed gtorbsim in future releases. You may recall that the old gtorbsim is no longer being built anyway.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Not sure where this belongs, but Eric Winter reports that he has successfully ported v9r4p1 of the Science Tools to the HEASARC hmake environment. This built on his experience with doing the same for v9r2p2 and what could be reused was reused. I suspect that it was a complete port; for distribution to end users in real life (as opposed to GLAST Users Group beta testers), I think that the test applications and assorted other applications like makeFT* will be removed.

For the beta test by the GUG, Eric reports that he is likely to get back to making an extended version of ModelEditor that (to the extent possible) can translate between likelihood and obsSim source models and also will use ROOT GUIs.

I have heard that Analia finished making extended reference pages (equivalent to FTOOLS fhelp pages) for the Science Tools. These have been mostly reviewed by the tool developers and should be provided to Chuck soon. Analia may also start bringing the Workbook tutorials up to date.

Source Catalog

Met last week. Jean presented initial results from studying the effect of bright sources on source detection and characterization in their vicinities. The concern was that the bright EGRET pulsars especially are not well fit by the unbroken power-law spectra that are assumed for the Catalog analysis. Jean-Marc's investigations of the residual charged-particle backgrounds in the LEO 55-day data set were also discussed.

Science Tools Working Group

Our last meeting was January 16. With the workshop in Bari this week, and also the likelihood of a Catalog group meeting, most likely we will not meet again until next Wednesday.

Since Jan. 30, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r4p1. It has some important updates relative to v9r4 and will be the version made available by the GSSC to the GLAST Users Group for their 'beta test' in early March. The updates include standardizing on equatorial coordinates for the livetime cubes and fixes to some packages to make them work on Windows and/or Linux. Binary demodulation has been improved for pulsar simulations. If you are makeFT1 user, the new version will run much faster for large files with many columns. Toby has factor out HEALPix-related code from pointlike to a new package skymaps that will be used by Markus and Gulli, at least, in their work on analyis methods for diffuse emission.
Here is the complete list of updates since v9r4.

Data products: Warren has generated and delivered examples of LS-001, LS-002, LS-003, and LS-005 files to the GSSC using TVAC test data. The ingest system there is unhappy with the formats to varying degrees. The issues appear to be minor and mostly relate LS-001 ('full' event information - basically an extended FT1 file with ~200 columns of variables from the Merit files) and LS-003 (the livetime cubes). Rev A of the recently-baselined File Format Document is on the horizon.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news

GRB tools

No news

Pulsar tools

Masa reported last week that he and James are working on implementing handling of ephemeris handling for alternate sets of timing parameters for binary pulsars.

Observation simulation

No news. The updates mentioned in the last report have made it into the v9r4p1 release, as described above

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

No news

Source Catalog

Last met on January 23. Jean presented results from him and Gino on source detection and characterization in the L&EO data. These results were summarized in Jean's presentation last Friday at the LEO 55-day closeout meeting. The pointed-mode data proved challenging for the catalog analysis. Jim's prescription for tuning GTIs based on the angular distance of an ROI from the horizon was used to effectively filter against albedo gamma rays. The residual background, whether from albedo gamma rays or charged particles, was unmodeled, however, and led to poor determinations of the fluxes and spectra of the point sources.

Science Tools Working Group

We met last week (13 attendees) and probably will meet next week.

Since Jan. 11, the current version of the Science Tools is v9r4. It has the pointlike package, and omits gtorbsim, as have been previously described. It also includes for the first time the new gtptest pulsar tool. It also has a fix for simulations of binary pulsars. Other package updates since v9r3p4 are listed here . If you are a Science Tools user, you will want to upgrade. Note that you need to be careful to not mix livetime cubes from earlier versions with the v9r4 Science Tools (see below).

Data products: After a lot of work this past week, graciously and carefully updating the specifications of some of the Science Data Products to be consistent with current usage in the Science Tools, David has submitted the Science Data Products ICD and FFD for baselining. I'm not exactly sure what the process is. Several of the templates in the Science Tools for the headers of the data products needed updating in one way or another for consistency with HEASARC conventions and these are in progress or in some cases already complete. The detailed definition of LS-001 (the extended version of FT1) was left incomplete. This is understood to be an evolving data product in any case. David expects to rebaseline the documents before launch - this is a way of saying that many updates are expected, but they will be done in a formal way.

Other news: The GLAST Users Group will 'beta test' the Science Tools in early March. For this test the GUG members will be at their home institutions, i.e., no hands-on help will be available. Eric Winter and Brian Irby (GSFC) have succeeded in porting the Science Tools to the HEASARC hmake build system, which is how they will be distributed by HEASARC. The port is for v9r3 and currently the plan is to stick with it for the test. The Big Run data will not be ready by the time of the test; most likely the GUG members will be directed to the LEO 55-day data set (with some guidance about time ranges, etc.). In anticipation of the beta test, Analia Cillis has been assembling extended, current versions of our reference pages for the Science Tools in the User Workbook; Masa has been working on the pulsar tools versions of these pages. They anticipate circulating these more widely for comment soon, and delivering them to Chuck for incorporation in the Workbook.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

In v9r4 of the Science Tools the default coordinate system for the livetime cubes (HEALPix) was changed from equatorial to Galactic. In principle would not have to be a problem, since the coordinate system is listed in the headers of the livetime cubes. However, it turned out that the coordinate specification was not read in. Jean noticed the strong effect on exposure maps right away and Jim tracked down the problem. Toby has changed the default back to equatorial and I think has also made the code interpret the coordinate specification from the header.

GRB tools

No news.

Pulsar tools

No development news; last week Masa circulated a proposed updated format for the pulsar ephemeris database file. This incorporates parameters for additional binary pulsar timing models that David Smith pointed out we will want.

Observation simulation

Jim and Toby worked out a scheme to assign unique IDs to SourcePopulation sources. Until now, the faint blazars in the sky model have been specified as steady sources using SourcePopulation; this is a compact, convenient, and fast way to define theme but had the side effect of assigning only one ID to potentially thousands of different sources. This matters if you are studying source detection and the catalog analysis. The scheme that they worked out seems to work; Nicola's test run of the Ops Sim 2 sky model is evidence. The one-week gtobssim run has gamma rays from >18,000 unique sources.

As mentioned above, Max has implemented a fix to the simulation of binary pulsars.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Jim reported that the behavioral issues with APE in the hoops package are fixed in a more recent version of APE. James will import this - it may have already been done. APE is not yet in a release version of the Science Tools; waiting on a Windows build of the APE library.

Source Catalog

Did not meet last week.

Science Tools Working Group

We did not meet this week but probably will next Wednesday.

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r3p4. The updates described below are not in an actual release yet.

Data products: Not much news. Julie has examples of LS-001 files - these are FT1++. They have the columns of FT1 plus about 200 more, representing all of the Merit variables that are used in the classification of events. The definitions of these columns will necessarily evolve some. The idea is that these will be the 'full event' data product that is provided to the GSSC. Julie wants to make sure the files are what she intended; when they are ok, and Warren gets the pipeline to make one of these files, Mali will be able to sign off on a lingering requirement. David needs to finish the specifications in the FFD soon - and I owe him some replies.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news.

GRB tools

No news.

Pulsar tools

Masa reports there's no news

Observation simulation

From Jim:

• fixed the memory leak in the Primack05 EBL attenuation model (celestialSources/eblAtten v0r5)
• fixed the 214 microsec sampling issue in SpectralTransient for the big run sky model (celestialSources/genericSources v1r9p5) [see comments on Nicola's posting on a test of the Big Run sky model; other artifacts from the limited precision of the random number generator can be found - e.g., the minimum non-zero time between photons in the diffuse model turns out to be 2 ^-25 seconds, for what it is worth.]
• disabled gtorbsim build (observationSim v7r2p1) [The interface to the flux package changed with Toby's rewrite - specifically how faint sources get disabled - and this broke gtorbsim. It probably could be reworked to work again but gttakosim is still our future.]

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

From Jim: "fixed DATE-OBS, TSTART, etc. keyword bug for empty FT1 files generated by makeFT1 (fitsGen v3r8p2)"

James has imported APE to replace PIL in the hoops package. It is in the LATEST builds of the Science Tools. Jim has reported a couple of bugs to James; one of them relates to why the unit test in the sane package has started failing.

Source Catalog

Met this week and covered a number of interesting topics. Jean gave an update on the comparison of the source detection algorithms, incorporating results from an improved PGwave algorithm. He also discussed his investigation of sources that the source detection algorithms find but the catalog pipeline discarded - evidence that another iteration step is needed in the catalog analysis. Toby gave a detailed update on what is new with pointfind and on development directions in the near future. He is also starting to generate the true source list from the sky model for the Big Run. This is a thankless task - so thank him.

Science Tools Working Group

We did not meet this week and won't meet until 2008.

The current version of the Science Tools remains v9r3p4.

From Chris: "One item of possible interest to the group: beta-test 2 is still planned for late Feb/early March 08, but the GUG has requested to review the documentation as an agenda item in the February (25?) F2F meeting. Thus we'll need to release it (or at least a mature draft) about 1 week prior to that."

Data products: Some discussion of FT2 (LS-005) took place this week. The attitude quaternions to be added would be the same as GBM is including in their equivalent of a pointing history data product (GS-006).

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news. Jim and Jean have been evaluating the effects on TS values from the improvement to the diffuse response calculations that Jim made and were described in last week's report; see Unbinned vs Binned TS in the Likelihood Tools.

GRB tools

No news.

Pulsar tools

Masa reports that he and James have finished the first version of gtptest, the tool that runs a variety of periodicity tests for a given set of timing parameters. They have started to add support for additional binary orbit models; this will also involve extending the definition of the pulsar ephemeris database file.

Observation simulation

No news. In the LATEST build (v6r1p2 of observationsSim), Jim has shifted PHI and EARTH_AZIMUTH_ANGLE to be in the range 0-360.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

Not sure where this belongs. As described in more detail in his note to scisoftlist, Toby has added the pointlike package to the Science Tools. It is both a floor wax and a dessert topping (as Heather and SNL would say). He and his students are developing it for source localization and source finding. It also sees use in their LAT-spacecraft alignment analyses and via HEALPix can make all-sky convolutions, among other capabilities.

As probably mentioned in the core report, Toby has converted the astro package to a shareable library and moved the HEALPix code to its own package (healpix).

Source Catalog

Did not meet this week.