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|
 2005 Annual Report
Index:
Personnel |
Research |
Programmatic |
Publications
III. Programmatic
The development of GLAST Science Support Center (GSSC) documents
continues to be a major preoccupation of
David Band, who again revised
the GSSC Functional Requirements Document, and continued to edit the
Science Data Products Interface Control Document (ICD) which specifies
which science data products are exchanged between ground elements, and
defines their format. He extracted the description of the User
Support software from the GSSC Design document and wrote the GLAST
User Support Tools Detailed Design Document. He has also been working
on the documentation for the science tools, designing and implementing
the tools that proposers for the GLAST Guest Investigator (GI) program
will use to develop their proposals, and the tools that will provide
the scientific community information about the GLAST mission. In
particular, he developed the prototype for a simple tool that will
estimate the detectability of sources GLAST might observe.
Band also
supports the meetings and telecons of the GLAST Users' Committee by
developing agendas, supporting the logistics,making presentations,
writing the minutes, tracking the action items and maintaining the
Committee's website. He finished the software to simulate the ?-ray
burst data products the GLAST Burst Monitor will produce. These data
products will be used in the next 'Data Challenge' that will test the
data analysis tools that will be provided to the users of GLAST
data. As part of various burst working groups within the GLAST team
Band
has been applying his burst detector sensitivity methodology to
predict the burst science GLAST will hopefully address. He has also
been serving as a 'burst advocate' (BA) for the Swift mission, and as
such participates every few weeks in the response to a gamma-ray burst
detected by Swift by collecting and digesting the Swift
and non-Swift
observations of a burst that has just occurred. Thus
Band is an author
(or co-author) several GCN Circulars that are distributed to the burst
community.
As part of NASA's INTEGRAL Guest Observer Facility (GOF)
Volker Beckmann
continued the work on the high-level results archive, which
has been used intensively by the astronomical community. He also made
major contributions (preparation, two presentations) to the INTEGRAL
Workshop held in 2005 November at NASA/GSFC.
As manager of both the RXTE and Swift GOFs at
NASA/GSFC Patricia Boyd
completed a number of tasks. In the case of RXTE, these included
organization and lead on the Cycle 10 budget review, organization and
runninng of the Cycle 11 Science Review, and working with a DC Public
Schools teacher (Valyncia Lindsey) on the design, development of &
presentation at an educator workshop based on RXTE's "High-Energy
Groovie Movie". In the case of Swift
Boyd's tasks included the
close-out of Cycle-1 review, distributing the funds to the successful
PIs, and preparation work for Cycle-2 (with the help of NASA Research
and Education Support Servises).
Boyd was also the NASA/GSFC lead
liasing with NASA HQ on the text for the Cycle-3 Call for Proposals.
John Cannizzo's
programmatic duties consisted of providing support for
Swift and LIGO. The Swift work consisted of several ``on-call''
shifts of 48 hrs as BA, with related follow-up activities. The LIGO
technical support consists of 8 hr shifts at the LIGO site in
Livingston, LA.
Cannizzo also assisted in the preparation of a
variety of proposals for new and upcoming missions.
James Chiang
is the GLAST/LAT Science Tools code libriarian. In this
capacity, he oversees and manages the Science Tools code releases. He
is also the principal developer for the likelihood analysis tools, the
high-level observation simulator tool, and the data-subselector
tool. The likelihood package comprises the main tools to be used for
spectral and spatial analysis of data from the LAT. The observation
simulator is used by the software developers for testing the analysis
software and will be used by guest observers for planning observations
and making feasibility studies.
Chiang is responsible for
implementing the instrument response functions based on the
calibration data provided by the LAT team, and he manages the
definition and implementation of the models of astrophysical sources
for both the high-level observation simulator and the full Gleam Monte
Carlo simulation code.
David Davis
continues as the head of the Data Archives & Software
Support section of the GSSC, and as such oversaw the GSSC part of the
data distribution for "Data Challenge 2" using the database. He also
helped with the "Science Tools Checkup 3" which is used to verify
software functionality for the upcoming data challenges.
Davis is also
overseeing the GLAST science software being developed at the GSSC, is
actively working on several science tools, and coordinating the GSSC
science analysis scenarios. He participated in several of the GLAST
internal design reviews, and presented talks at the Ingest System
Design Review and the Photon Database Design Review.
Davis also
continues to update the project documentation, MOU, the GSSC
Operations software architecture, and the GSSC test plans.
Masaharu Hirayama
continued making contributions to the development of
the analysis tools of GLAST/LAT data. Most of the pulsar analysis
tools were implemented, and their functionality and user interface
were reviewed by the development team members.
Hirayama also continued
working on the FITS file definitions for various GLAST data sets,
mainly on the structure and the contents of event files, and
maintaining supporting WWW pages.
Dirk Petry
lead the GSSC through the GLAST Mission Ground Readiness
Tests (GRTs) 1 and 2, and performed the preparatory internal GSSC
software tests, and help prepaere for GRT 3.
Petry also worked on
completing the Monte Carlo model of the Earth's gamma-ray emission for
the GLAST Monte Carlo data generation. Both tasks were completed
successfully. The GSSC software passed all tests and an automated
system was set up such that the tests can be repeated at any time when
modifications to the software require it. The Earth emission
simulation was completed and verified using archival data from the
CGRO/EGRET instrument, and has since been used for all studies of the
GLAST data analysis.
Index:
Personnel |
Research |
Programmatic |
Publications
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