Science Tools Working Group
Met this week (11 attendees).
Since October 5, the current version of ScienceTools is v9r2p2. Here are the minor differences from v9r2p1. Jim removed Mc variables from Pass5_classifier - they weren't actually used in the classifying and the change was needed to process the Ops Sim data sets. It isn't clear yet whether we'll have a new release of the Science Tools to go along with the release of the 55-day Interleaved data set sometime next week. Whether or not we do is not vitally important.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No development news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim has fixed a bug that Jean noticed in the Python version of likelihood, relating to how a stored best-fit result was retained even if the source model changed.
GRB tools
No development news. Some JIRA issues relating to GRB tools were opened last week during the Ops Sim. The most serious of these is that gtburstfit is not currently working under Linux. James is working on resolving the issues.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James have updated the interface to the pulsar tools to include the prompting options needed now that barycentering-on-the-fly has been implemented. He is updated the doxygen documentation in the mainpage.h files. Then Masa will work on modifying the documentation for the workbook. One result of this changes in prompting is that users will be able to specify the solar system ephemeris that they want. This is not going to be needed by casual users but could be very important for the right user.
Observation simulation
No direct news. Valerie is updating the GBM simulation code, which is not part of the Science Tools.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James reports that he "addressed several issues in Ape and HEADAS related to file access checking performed on file (type "f") parameters. Specifically, not all access modes (read, write, file exists, file doesn't exist) were being checked correctly in various combinations. The code now checks all cases and behaves identically on Windows and on Linux/OSX. He also rationalized prompt redirections; under certain circumstances, Ape's prompts properly go directly to the user's terminal device instead of to the standard output. Ape was behaving differently in two cases: with and without readline."
Eric reports that converting the Science Tools from CMT to hmake (HEASARC) is not as much fun as it sounds. Discussion on this topic during the meeting was more or less along the lines of producing hmake files routinely for the Science Tools - manually (I suppose) or possibly with Scons - so that a complicated and delicate conversion script would not be needed at the GSSC end
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week, but did meet last week. Jean has compiled lists of sources detected in the obssim2 data by several algorithms (none of which searched for sources that were bright for only part of the year). He is developing a quantitative way to compare their performance; this is complementary to the Test Pattern studies. Ludovic demonstrated that gtfindsrc and pointfind (UW) both work well for refining initial guesses for positions of sources. pointfind has a speed advantage and will be included as a preprocessing step before source analysis in the Catalog pipeline.