Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is still getting into gear; yesterday Richard forecast one more week for all of the aspects to be finalized.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I implemented the "efficiency factor" that accounts for the trigger rate and energy dependent effects of ghost events on the effective area. The implementation is based on the parameterization of the trigger rate as a function of livetime fraction and of the linear fits to the relative efficiency as a function of trigger rate for different energy bands as described on slides 1 and 29 of David Paneque's presentation to C&A on April 20.
The code reads in a text file that contains the required six parameters. Currently, the location of that file is specified by an environment variable, EFFICIENCY_PAR_FILE, but eventually, this information would probably be added as an extension in the effective area FITS files in CALDB.
- I tested and updated the new P6_V[345] IRFs that Riccardo provided after having fixed the energy dispersion bug he reported at C&A last Thursday. It is in irfs/caldb v0r9p1.
Using the efficiency factor information will require another extension to the tabulation of accumulated livetimes in gtltcube, to include tabulation of livetime-weighted deadtime fractions. David and Eric's studies indicate that residual backgrounds (which to first order increase with deadtime fraction and so counter the efficiency factors) may also be an important consideration in applying efficiency factors to analyses of diffuse emission.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Finally the example files in the pulsar tools tutorials were replaced (both at FSSC and at SLAC). I've been working on minor bugs and issues in the pulsar tools, hoping to fix them before the upcoming data release."
Observation simulation
(Carry over from last week) The bug that Masa reported a bug in how the DATE-OBS keyword is still open. Most likely you will not notice unless you are trying to run the pulsar tools on simulated data.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
(Carry over from last week) In Science Tools v9r11 gtexpcube has a default parameter file that has hardwired inputs and does not prompt the user for inputs. This is in JIRA. As a workaround you could replace your system copy of gtexpcube.par with the same file from an earlier release; entering all of the parameters on the command line won't help.
Source Catalog
Last week the primary topic was revisions to the Bright Source List paper in response to the referee's report.