Science Tools Update, November 1, 2007
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week.
On Wednesday, Jim released v9r3p1 of the Science Tools. Here are the differences from v9r3. It has some bug fixes in the pulsar tools (see below), but the driving factor was switching to a rebuilt version of ROOT that did not expect to find itself on SLAC Linux. The problem was pointed out by Nicola O..
Data products: Julie mentioned yesterday the extended version of the event summary (FT1) files. These are planned to be a large superset of the FT1 files in terms of contents (~200 quantities vs. ~18 for FT1) and may also be a superset in terms of the events included. The additional variables will be quantities from the Merit files, and these files will be delivered routinely to the GSSC to facilitate the extra-Science Tools use of the data. Julie has a makeFT1 dictionary file to make the extended version of FT1 and plans to use it this week to make example files from the new 55-day run.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that the likelihood tools now check the IRF names in the diffuse response columns of FT1 files. Not doing this had become a more obvious potential problem with the advent of Pass 5 IRFs, which currently have 3 classes.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa and James fixed the PULS-41 (gtpphase ignores the phi0 parameter) and PULS-42 (negative phases possible) issues.
Masa is working on updating documentation for the User Workbook.
Observation simulation
Jim reports that the new RadialSource source has been tested in Gleam.
Jim fixed the JIRA issue OBS-12, that gtobssim had been ignoring the LIVETIME column in input pointing histories. Riccardo pointed out this problem.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Met again this week. Jean presented results from a new look at the test pattern data sets with likelihood analysis. One interesting result was the flux limit as a function of source spectral index. He also updated his comparison of source detection algorithms on obssim2 data, drawing interesting conclusions from studying which sources were detected by only one of the algorithms. Jean also investigated the effect of removing sources below the detection threshold in the 'time' part of the pipeline analysis. This is fairly closely analagous to what is done for source monitoring in ASP. He found that the effects on the measured fluxes for the remaining sources were typically very small. He did not measure the CPU time but by halving the number of sources the expectation is that the CPU time required decreased by a factor of 4.