Science Tools Working Group
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r7p1.
Data products: The planned additions to FT2 contents are posted and still working their way toward implementation. The additions related to rocking angle will become more relevant in the near future with the enabling of ARRs.
You may have followed some newly-posted JIRAs on the science data products this week. One you might notice is a 1-second error in DATE-OBS and DATE-END keyword strings, apparently owing to incorrect handling of leap seconds. This does not affect how the Science Tools run (although my impression - to be confirmed - is that the start_date-to-MET conversion used by gtobssim has the reciprocal leap second bug - harmless unless you are trying to simulate using an as-flown pointing history, in which case it is just annoying).
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "In the pulsar tools development, gtpulsardb now records a log of database creation process in HISTORY keywords of the primary header of the output file, and the pulsar tools that handle ephemeris database files now report the information for higher chattiness level (chatter=4 or larger). Also, the pulsar tools that create a FITS file writes all parameter values into HISTORY keywords of the output file.
We are hoping that those additional records will help users (and us) diagnose a problem when it happens." [N.B. These updates are not yet in a release version of Science Tools]
Observation simulation
No news, although see Data Products notes above
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last week's discussion was more about the August source list and associations. Will meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r7p1.
Data products: The planned additions to FT2 contents are posted. Warren mentioned today that starting as soon as today FT2 files with 1-second resolution would be available from the Data Catalog. These (or their close cousins) are produced in the L1 pipeline by ft2Util anyway - to feed Gleam spacecraft and attitude information, and turning them into FT2 files was a small additional step. Note - you don't need these at all for your routine analyses but they might be interesting to look at, especially for GRB-type impulsive sources.
Databases and related utilities
No news. Tony made a new release of the Astro Server at SLAC last week; if you had used the Astro Server by that time, you already know about this. The new release fixes bugs in the FITS headers and GTIs of the output. Tony has written a FAQ.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I implemented the photon and energy flux and error calculations that Jean requested and that were described in my talk at the Monday session of the Collaboration meeting. This is in Likelihood v13r18, pyLikelihood v1r6, and ST HEAD1.686. There is documentation on confluence
- For the DM group, I have implemented a class that will handle multiple likelihood analyses for different regions of the sky simultaneously, tying together the spectral parameters that are expected to be same, i.e., the parameters describing with the dark matter spectrum. The basic idea was outlined by Jan Conrad during the DM splinter meeting. This is in Likelihood v13r18p3, pyLikelihood v1r7, and ST LATEST1.2465
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "As reported last Friday [in an e-mail to some known users], gtbary (v5) has three more parameters for the future implementation of geocentric option. Also, the other pulsar tools that read event files (gtpphase v7r1, gtophase v7r1, gtpsearch v10r1, and gtpspec v10r1) no longer accept an event file that has already been processed by gtbary, in order to mitigate a potential pitfall in a tempo-spectral analysis."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last week's discussion was about the August source list and associations. Will meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r7p1. Reminder: Toby has pointed out that in this release and apparently others since mid-July the packages related to pulsar tools did not compile under Windows. Some other unit tests failed in the Windows builds as well, although these may not indicate fundamental problems.
The current HEAD build (1.683) differs from v9r7p1 primarily in the skymaps and pointlike packages; updates to gtbin and gtrspgen seem to be in the works as well for the next release.
Richard reported that last week SCCS provided 2 RHEL5/gcc4 systems on the farm for the Release Manager to use. RM is not yet making builds for gcc4, however.
The tutorial session on high-level analyses at the collaboration meeting last week was...succcesful. It included a number of how-to presentations.
Data products: The proposed additions to FT2 contents mentioned in the last report are still in progress, with consideration being given to how to set the LAT_MODE column in a useful way - useful for filtering FT1 files, that is.
Databases and related utilities
See the presentations by Tony and Tom S. in the tutorial session mentioned above. Tony described a number of new or updated Data Server services and Tom described features of the FSSC data server, including authentication as a LAT user.
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "The pulsar tools made a major version up for an added feature of ephemeris status reporting. The tools produce warning message(s) when given event file(s) cover a time interval that overlaps with an
ephemeris gap or an exceptional event (such as glitches) in a given pulsar database file. Note that the new feature only gives warning message(s), and the behavior of the tools (such as pulse phase assignment by gtpphase) did not change."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Not sure where this belongs: At the meeting last week Markus and Eric W. presented approaches for studying (measuring) source extent, in the session on Issues on high-level analyses.
No other news, although if you missed it last week you may want to take a look at Gino's presentation on iLAT as a user interface for Web-based analysis
Source Catalog
Will meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r7p1. Reminder: Toby has pointed out that in this release and apparently others since mid-July the packages related to pulsar tools did not compile under Windows. Some other unit tests failed in the Windows builds as well, although theses may not indicate fundamental problems.
The current HEAD build (1.682) differs from v9r7p1 primarily in the skymaps and pointlike packages.
I forgot again this week to check with Richard this week about whether SCS has provided RHEL5/gcc4 systems on the farm for the Release Manager to use. I'd assume that no news is no news. In any case, the RM is not making builds for gcc4 and I think we do not yet have a complete set of the external libraries built under gcc4.
The agenda for the tutorial session on high-level analyses for next Monday morning at the collaboration meeting is posted. Please note that this session will be followed in the afternoon by one on on (mostly open) issues for high-level analysis.
Data products: The proposed additions to FT1 and FT2 contents attracted a total of one comment; see here and here. An additional change to FT2 will be proposed, to add a column to include the equivalent of the Run Quality flag. And we expect to start using the already-existing LAT_MODE column. When implemented (you'll get word), these columns will be available for generating GTIs with gtmktime to filter out time ranges by LAT configuration or data quality.
Databases and related utilities
No new news; note that Tony and Tom S. will be giving must-see presentations in the tutorial session mentioned above.
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "As mentioned earlier, we are working on ephemeris status reporting feature, such as warning messages for glitches and timing noise stored in a pulsar database."
Regarding the Windows build problems mentioned above, Masa writes: "I guess they are all caused by the problem reported as the following JIRA issue, although I am not absolutely sure.
https://jira.slac.stanford.edu/browse/STGEN-54
It is fixed with pulsarDb v6r1 as mentioned in my response to the JIRA issue, but the version has another problem. James will be tagging v6r1p1 with the fix, and the problem will go away, I hope."
Aous reported a problem last week running gtpphase in Science Tools v9r7p1. As far as I know this is not resolved, although indications from Eric W. are that although the error message complained about the FT2 file the code may be getting tripped up when the user specifies a list of FT1 files rather than a single FT1 file for the event file input.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news, although you may be interested in the command line interface to Hera, the service developed by HEASARC to allow FTOOL and HEASOFT users to run tasks remotely on HEASARC computers. It doesn't have any immediate application for LAT data analysis, but is a noteworthy achievement, and the SSC will be releasing the Standard Analysis Environment Science Tools early next year.
Source Catalog
Did not meet last week.
Science Tools Working Group
This report is based on hearsay more than most - I forgot to solicit news.
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r7p1. Toby pointed out that in this release and apparently others since mid-July the packages related to pulsar tools did not compile under Windows. Some other unit tests failed in the Windows builds as well, although theses may not indicate fundamental problems.
The current HEAD build (1.679) differs from v9r7p1 only in the skymaps and pointlike packages.
I also forgot to check with Richard this week about whether SCS has provided RHEL5/gcc4 systems on the farm for the Release Manager to use. I'd assume that no news is no news.
An agenda for the tutorial session on high-level analyses, to be scheduled for Monday, September 15 at the collaboration meeting at SLAC, will be posted Real Soon Now.
Data products: Proposed additions to FT1 and FT2 contents remain open for comments through today; see here and here. 'Proposed' means suggested. So far, only one comment (mostly nay) about the proposed change to FT1 and no comments about the proposed additions to FT2.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met last week; see Dave's notes linked to the agenda page. The topics included spectral fits and light curves for the First Light sources.
Science Tools Working Group
Since August 12, the current release version of the Science Tools is v9r7p1. Here are the differences from v9r7. Among the updates are the addition of an optional zenith angle cut to gtmktime (see below). Also as described last week, a fix to gtmodel has been made. The skymaps and pointlike packages have been updated as well.
John Vernaleo has recently joined the GSSC as a programmer. He has been working with gtbin and gtrspgen, two Standard Analysis Environment tools that will be (or are being) distributed by the GSSC to support analysis of GBM data.
In the not-too-distant future, the Release Manager will be able to make builds of the Science Tools on RHEL5/gcc4 systems. This will be a step toward being sure that the Science Tools compile/run on more-current versions of gcc. Eric W. is working on making gcc4 builds of the external libraries.
Reminder: A tutorial on high-level analyses is most likely going to be scheduled for Monday, September 15, the day of splinter session meetings before the collaboration meeting at SLAC.
Data products: Proposed additions to FT1 and FT2 contents are open for comments; see here and here. 'Proposed' means suggested.
Databases and related utilities
My understanding (from Julie) is that Tom S. has data being ingested in the server at GSSC but some of the details of the authentication of users via SLAC have not yet been worked out. Tony announced the FT1 skimmer last week; the updated Astro Data Server is not online yet.
Jim reports that in Science Tools v9r7p1 he added a "capability to gtmktime wherein it will compute the appropriate ROI-based zenith angle cut if the corresponding DSS keywords are present from gtselect"; see last week's report.
Likelihood analysis
Jim reported last week v9r7p1 will have "a fix for gtmodel wherein the normalization of the model maps was somewhat off from the fit result (Likelihood v13r17)"
Jim has implemented a fix for another problem with gtmodel that Jean reported. He noticed that diffuse sources were being offset in latitude by 0.25 or 0.3 deg, with the offset apparently depending on the size of the diffuse model map. The fix is not yet in a release of Science Tools.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "I am thinking of modifying the existing tools (such as gtpphase) to report ephemeris gaps and glitches which overlap with GTI's of input file(s). That way, users can do whatever they want to do with a list of potentially problematic time intervals (which I can call BTI, or Bad Time Intervals). Also, it serves as a warning message to notify users something that might affect their analysis results."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met last week; see Dave's notes linked to the agenda page. The topics included spectral fits and light curves for the First Light sources.
Science Tools Working Group
We will have a short meeting tomorrow, 8-8:30 am Pacific, before the Catalog meeting.
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r7. Here again are the differences from v9r6p3. See the Science Tools Update for July 29 for a summary of the differences.
Jim reports that v9r7p1 will be tagged soon (building as of 7:10 am Pacific today), with a fix to gtmodel and an important update to gtmktime for analyzing pointed observations (see below)
Chris informs me that gtbin and gtbindef have been released to the world by the GSSC to support analysis of GBM data.
A tutorial on high-level analyses is most likely going to be scheduled for Monday, September 15, the day of splinter session meetings before the collaboration meeting at SLAC. Details are still TBD.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
My understanding (from Julie) is that Tom, Navid, and Tony have worked out a way for the data server at GSSC to use the authentication system at SLAC. Also, Tony is working on getting the Astro Data Server online (with some updates); in addition he plans to introduce a 'skimmer' for FT1 files. I'm not sure where it will be announced, but LAT people will get word.
Jim reports that in Science Tools v9r7p1 will add a "capability to gtmktime wherein it will compute the appropriate ROI-based zenith angle cut if the corresponding DSS keywords are present from gtselect:
ki-rh2[jchiang] gtmktime Spacecraft data file[] ../FT2_merged.fits Filter expression[IN_SAA!=T] LIVETIME>0 Apply ROI-based zenith angle cut[yes] Event data file[] events_100_300000.fits Output event file name[] foo.fits ki-rh2[jchiang]
In the above, the user has the ability to disable this. (dataSubselector v6r2)"
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that Science Tools v9r7p1 will have "a fix for gtmodel wherein the normalization of the model maps was somewhat off from the fit result (Likelihood v13r17)"
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "James and I went through the code to finalize our clean-up works, and ended up finding some issues and bugs (including the one reported as JIRA PULS-44). We are currently working on them."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met last week; see Dave's notes linked to the agenda page. The topics included (provisionally) naming ASP sources and derivation of light curves for the sources. Alignment checks in Toby's analysis were also discussed, as well as Kent's detection of sources by eye from Toby's maps.
Science Tools Working Group
No meeting again this week. There's not a lot of news to report.
Since July 26 current release version of the Science Tools is v9r7. Here are the differences from v9r6p3. Most of the updates relate to facilitating porting the tools to the hmake build environment that will be used at GSSC, which also entails making the code buildable on a wider variety of systems. Eric W. determined the needed changes and posted them as JIRA issues for the respective package owners. These should be transparent to users of the Science Tools. Toby and Marshal have extensively updated the skymaps and pointlike packages; from the release notes I get the impression that the functionality has not changed.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reminds us of an issue that I think Jim originally pointed out regarding barycenter arrival time corrections; gtbary changes every time-related quantity in the files that it processes. As a result, likelihood analyses of phase-selected photons can give noticeably-incorrect results because the event times no longer correspond to the correct part of the pointing history file. Masa originally proposed eliminating gtbary, since the pulsar tools can generate and apply barycenter arrival time corrections on the fly. However, enough users depend on barycenter arrival time corrections that eliminating gtbary does not look useful. I think that Masa is working on a way that gtbary can indicate in a FITS file whether the times have been corrected
Observation simulation
Max R. has updated the PulsarSpectrum package in response to a couple of needed tweks
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met last week and will meet tomorrow. Issues in source associations (with members of other catalogs) were discussed last week
Science Tools Working Group
No meeting again this week. There's not a lot of news to report this week.
The current release version of the Science Tools is v9r6p3. Here are the differences from v9r5p6. It has a few updates that will be of interest to interactive users of the Science Tools (as opposed to ASP).
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim updated gtltcube to optionally apply a zenith angle cut in calculating the livetime cubes. The cut cannot be applied later. Cuts on zenith angle can significantly influence the exposure for pointed observations (when the FOV can become partially occulted by the earth). Note: Likelihood does not handle zenith angle cuts in data, however, meaning that for pointed-mode analyses, ROIs and source regions need to be defined carefully, or time range filtering should be applied to select time ranges when a particular region is not at large zenith angle.
See the note below about gtselect
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing special in the pulsar tools development. FYI, James and I are doing final checks before tagging the pulsar tools with improved time-handling classes, etc., although users will see only a few differences on the surface with the new versions."
Observation simulation
Toby's relaxing of the consistency checking in astro, which allows the simulated pointing histories from the GSSC to be used with gtobssim and Gleam, is in the current release of the Science Tools. This doesn't solve the problem of why the consistency checks were failing, but allows simulations, e.g., of L&EO observations, to proceed.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Jim has fixed a bug in gtselect to have it update the TSTART and TSTOP keywords if multiple input FT1 files are given. This is important because gtmktime uses these keywords.
It appears that with the current release of Science Tools we are now using Ape instead of PIL for prompting. I'm not sure how you would notice the difference but it seems to not have broken anything
Source Catalog
Met twice last week. Jean presented and we discussed First-Light source detection and counterpart assessments.
Science Tools Working Group
We last met on May 21; once again this week we will not meet. There's not a lot of news to report this week; also I discovered late that my e-mail polling for development news did not get sent; at least I'm not sure where it went. So in some cases below 'No news' means 'None that I know of'.
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r5p6. Most of the development since (as measured by LATEST builds) has been Toby's work on the pointlike package; see note on the pointfind application below.
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 news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news. An upcoming topic will be when to move to the Event Class Handling system that Jim has proposed and developed.
Source Catalog
Met last week. Toby presented an update on pointfind - the high-TS spurious source problem has been solved but the tradeoff currently is in numbers of good detections. Ludovic presented results on source detection in the new obssim3 data set. Jean presented the Catalog Group's interests in issues regarding First Light products.
Science Tools Working Group
We last met on May 21; once again this week we will not meet.
Since June 19 the current release version of the Science Tools has been v9r5p6. Here are the differences from v9r5p5. A number of small but important updates have been made, and if you are a regular user of the Science Tools you probably should switch to this version
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No new news. The bug fix mentioned last week - Jim reported that he "fixed a bug in the convolution code for binned analysis wherein Ping was seeing slight offsets for her high-latitude DM source maps (Likelihood v13r15)" - is in the new release of the Science Tools.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: He and James "are still working on time handling classes. As always, the more we go, the more issues we find. None of them are critical, but we still need to carefully fix them one by one
Observation simulation
Richard has updated the microQuasar source to no longer reset the random number seed; this is in the current Science Tools release.
The bug fix that Jim reported last week - "Johann encountered and fixed a problem in the code that allows one to select submaps when running simulations with the MapSource sources. (celestialSources/genericSources v1r11p3)" - is in the new release, as is another fix by Jim for handling short time intervals in the FitsTransient source.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Windows users of the Science Tools: Toby reports that he has developed an alternative to the vbs scripts generated by the Release Manager. The approach and installation procedure are described here. Users install CMT and a batch file that Toby has written, in addition to an RM distribution of the Science Tools. The big advantage is that all of the Science Tools are made available in the same terminal window. Also CMT is guaranteed to set the environoment variables correctly.
Eric W. has started work on porting the 'core' (Standard Analysis Environment) of v9r5p5 to the HEASARC hmake build system.
Source Catalog
Met last week. Jean presented an analysis of the detectability of sources in the 'obssim3' data - based on their specifications and locations. He also discovered that the obssim3 data were seriously flawed; owing to frequent resets of the random number seed when the data were generated the Galactic diffuse and extragalactic diffuse emission were 'spiky' - with identical photons tending to pile up in the same directions on the sky. By last Thursday, the obssim3 sky had been regenerated by Nicola and merged back in with the resampled backgrounds. The files are living here but Real Soon Now should be in the Data Catalog and xrootd.
Science Tools Working Group
We last met on May 21; we will not meet this week.
The current release version of the Science Tools is v9r5p5. Here are the differences from v9r5p4. A number of small updates have been made. Jim reports that the principal reason for the new tag is so that for L1 processing the same version of ROOT (v5.18.00c-g11) would be used in the Science Tools and GlastRelease. In terms of changes that you are most likely to notice, gtobssim now enforces a deadtime of 26 microseconds per event.
Data products: No news. The delivery of data products from ASP to the GSSC has been a recent focus. Also, we don't seem to have a universal understanding of the frequency of deliveries of livetime cubes (LS-003).
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that he "fixed a bug in the convolution code for binned analysis wherein Ping was seeing slight offsets for her high-latitude DM source maps (Likelihood v13r15)" [this is not yet in a release]
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing exciting in the pulsar tools development. We are still working on the time handling classes, and have almost done what we planned for the classes to change. But, lots of bugs and problems were found in the process, and we are shooting them now. Although I don't think those bugs affect analysis results with the pulsar tools, I think we should fix them now rather than later."
Observation simulation
Richard has updated the microQuasar source to no longer reset the random number seed; this is in the current Science Tools release.
From Jim: "Johann encountered and fixed a problem in the code that allows one to select submaps when running simulations with the MapSource sources. (celestialSources/genericSources v1r11p3)" [not yet in a release]
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Not sure where this belongs, but in case you do not read infrasoftlist, you should see Tony's note about the new version of the GUI code installer. It should be much more robust against network flakiness ("Guaranteed to work even at the cocoa beach holiday inn").
Source Catalog
Did not meet last week. Will meet this week, with one main topic being source detection on the obssim3 data set.
Science Tools Working Group
We met last week, 12 attendees (F de Palma, T Stephens, J Peachey, N Giglietto, F Gargano, J Chiang, S Digel, E Winter, D Band,F Giordano, A Caliandro, M Hirayama).
Dave Davis and Eric Winter provided recap of the feedback to the GSSC from the GLAST Users Group from their 'beta test' of the Science Tools. The Beta Test was not limited to the GLAST Users Group members, in that the GSSC also recruited some other likely users.
The GSSC has been able to verify installations working at about 10 institutions representing 17 Beta Test participants, on a remarkable variety of Linux versions, thanks to a lot of work. In making distributions in the HEASARC hmake system, Eric found that he had to make some small changes in some packages to get the 64-bit builds to work. He is planning to enter these changes as JIRA issues for the package owners in our repository. Eric reports that the tools cannot be ported to Mac OSX 10.5 before a ROOT build for that version is made. [Update from Eric W.: "we have a 10.4 binary running on 10.5 now"]
Dave Davis said that only 5 feedback reports had been about the tools themselves, rather than installation issues. Apparently none of the comments were about bugs; some were comments on the documentation. So right now it looks like no major issues will arise from the Beta Test. This is ok.
The current release version of the Science Tools remains v9r5p4.
Data products: No news. We had a long discussion about whether TDMIN/TDMAX keywords should be included in the FT1 files. These are optional in the HEASARC specification; they are defined to contain the minimum and maximum values of a given column. Some tools, e.g., ds9, use them if they are present to set scaling parameters without having to read through the data. The GSSC data server has been configured to add them to the FT1 files. This is semi-problematic right now as they are not part of the agreed-on format and in particular gtselect does not interpret or update them. This does not break any of the Science Tools but we'll move to a resolution with the GSSC.
Discussion on this issue led to a discussion on delivery of the Science Tools to the GSSC, and what constitutes a part of the distribution intended for release by the GSSC to the public. Eric and Jim have converged on a current list of tools; this will get posted in...Confluence. More importantly, Jim has defined a checkout package, ST_dist, for the tools for the GSSC. Eric also has a proposed procedure for joint agreement on additions/deletions from the set of distributed tools. I think that it will fly; details later.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James "are still working on the time handling classes (bug fixes and clean-ups)"
Observation simulation
From Jim: "I fixed a bug in FitsTransient that Johann encountered for very fast transients (i.e., GRBs) that was related to roundoff errors for small time intervals being added to our 9 digit MET values (celestialSources/genericSources v1r11p2)."
Max's recently (Monday) checked in a new version of PulsarSpectrum (v2r5) that should fix a bug in handling environment variables that point to the location of files of pulsar parameters: "now the input method is more robust for preventing loops and wrong input files". He has also posted a tutorial.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim: "I updated evtClassDefs to use the pass-5 style event (non-) classifications so that FT1 files coming out of L1Proc correspond to the P6_v1 IRFs."
Source Catalog
Did not meet last week. Will meet this week, primarily for discussion of issues related to source association and identification.
Science Tools Working Group
We will have a meeting this week (tomorrow). The topics will include a recap of the feedback to the GSSC from the GLAST Users Group from their 'beta test' of the Science Tools.
Since May 15 the current release version of the Science Tools is v9r5p4. Here are the changes since v9r5p3. It has several behind-the-scenes changes that you should not notice plus a couple of small changes that you might. See below
Data products: No news
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "We are still working on time handling classes." This is toward the end of handling multiple timing models for binary pulsars
Observation simulation
Jim diagnosed an odd problem with the 'obssim3' simulations of the Big Run sky model as result from the microQuasar source reseting the random number seed. The symptom was that changing the seed given to gtobssim had no effect on the sequence of events that was output. Richard has fixed microQuasar to no longer do this, but the change is not yet in a release of the Science Tools.
For long gtobssim runs (of order 1 year) with a "complete" sky model (e.g., obssim3), we still encounter duplicate event times, probably owing to the intrinsic single precision of the random number generators we are using. See the discussion from obssim 1. As per Toby's suggestion, we have implemented a 26 micro second deadtime: photons with arrival times within this window relative to the previous photon will be discarded. This should result in a loss of a few hundred photons over the course of a year. observationSim v8r1p2, for now still only in ST LATEST.
Max's recent additions of environment variables to control the writing of log files by PulsarSpectrum is in v9r5p4 of the Science Tools; I don't know any more details at this point. Presumably Max also is working on updating the documentation in the User Workbook.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Toby's update to the astro package - mentioned in last week's report, is in the v9r5p4 release. It makes the code more flexible regarding what orders of magnitude to expect for the spacecraft position information.
Source Catalog
Met last week. The technical topics included a presentation by Markus on initial work on a tool to fit extended sources. Toby gave a presentation about unbinned vs. binned spectral fits.
Science Tools Working Group
We won't have a meeting this week this week; there's not a lot of new news and the Catalog group, Service Challenge Steering Committee, and the Cosmic-Ray Electrons groups will be putting the 8-10 am Pacific time slot to good use. The GSSC has received a lot of feedback from GUG members who participated in the Beta Test; this may be a topic at the next Science Tools meeting. Surprise users are reporting success with the Science Tools.
The current version of the Science Tools is v9r5p3. Here are the changes since v9r5p2. The noteworthy one is that Jim has included CALDB files with v1 of the Pass 6 IRFs, the update being Riccardo's improvement to the fitting of the energy redistribution profiles.
Data products: No news
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "James and I are still working on improving the time handling classes. It has been
slower than usual because I have been busy with other things." This is toward the end of handling multiple timing models for binary pulsars
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Toby has updated astro package - in this version "the EarthCoordinate constructor checks the size of the position vector, so that it can be in m (as demanded by GLAST) or km (as returned by the ephemeris). After it computes the actual altitude, it throws an exception if it is not in the range 500-600 km. I don't know what the actual range of validity is, but that should be OK for GLAST." This addresses a problem with processing some FT2 files in recent versions of the Science Tools; Analia Cillis and Thierry Reposeur independently came up against the problem, which Jim tracked to the astro package. The change was made May 12, and is only in LATEST builds so far.
Source Catalog
Met last week. No technical topics - at least not algorithms - were discussed.