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2005 Annual Report

III. Programmatic

Beckmann is a member of the US INTEGRAL Guest Observer Facility (GOF) and became its head in 2006 July. In this position he became responsible for collecting and organising the INTEGRAL AO-4 budget proposals and support for the AO-5 key program proposals. In addition, Dr Beckmann continued the work on the high-level results archive, which has been used intensively by the astronomical community. To support INTEGRAL operations he attended the INTEGRAL/SPI team meeting at the MPE in March and gave three presentations.

John Cannizzo's duties consisted of providing support for Swift and LIGO. The Swift work consisted of several ``on-call'' shifts of 48 hrs as ``Burst Advocate''. When a GRB occurs, the BA is notified and must participate in a telecon that begins within a few minutes of the GRB. The BA must then also be in the daily Swift planning telecon for several weeks afterward to provide advice for follow-up observations. The LIGO technical support consists of 8 hr shifts at the LIGO site in Livingston, LA. Dr Cannizzo also assisted in the preparation of a variety of proposals for new and upcoming missions. In terms of community work, there was also refereeing for journals (ApJ, A&A, Nature, etc.).

James Chiang designed and implemented Automated Science Processing (quicklook) analyses of the GLAST LAT data that will be used by the LAT Instrument Science Operations Center as part of its Level 2 processing. These analyses will include GRB detection, spectral and spatial analysis, and flaring source detection and monitoring, especially for blazar studies. Dr. Chiang chaired a group to evaluate and implement the LAT instrument response functions that are used by all of the LAT high level analysis software. He also continued maintaining and developing several key software analysis packages for the LAT: Likelihood analysis, observation simulator, data subselector, instrument response function interfaces, and software for event and spacecraft FITS file generation. In addition, Dr. Chiang operates as the overall LAT Science Tools code librarian, and organizes and tags code releases and helps coordinate package development among the various developers. He also implemented source models for simulation and analyses for the Blazar and Solar System GLAST Science Working groups.

David Davis continued as the head of the Data Archives & Software support section at the GLAST SSC and development for the GLAST mission is progressing smoothly. The sections particiation in the Ground System tests has gone smoothly. A beta version science tools was tested by the GLAST Users Committee and had generally good reviews.

Masaharu Hirayama continued making contributions to the development of the analysis tools of GLAST LAT (Large Area Telescope) data. Specifically, the pulsar analysis tools were improved in its user interface for clarity and ease of use, and added new features for users' convenience such as automated time conversions between different time systems. The tools were extensively tested and reviewed in Data Challenge 2, where a large set of data were generated for a simulated, all-sky survey by the entire GLAST instruments for 55 days and participants analyzed the data for their scientific goals, and several useful feedbacks were collected.