Science Verification Analysis and Calibration (SVAC)  

  Eduardo do Couto e Silva 

Last update September 25, 2005

Overview

The main SVAC responsibility is to ensure that the GLAST-LAT instrument is calibrated prior to on-orbit delivery to the Instrument Operations Center (IOC). The overview of SVAC Plan describes our pre-launch and post-launch activities. Yes, we still plan to launch in March 2006 ! Our activities include, but are nor limited to, calibrations. The idea is to learn as much as possible about the LAT while on the ground (e.g. we calibrate during environmental tests). This will not only lead to well understood calibrations on-orbit but also minimize debugging time while we are up there. During normal operations we should be able to quickly access and interpret information from ground tests. If we plan right, we will spend more time doing science than doing calibrations.  We are also responsible for the analysis of the data coming from the hardware tests during integration. We will verify that the data collected in the beam tests or cosmic rays tests are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The Science Analysis Software team will provides us with reconstruction software and we will check if data and MC agree. Beam tests and cosmic rays test will be used to tune the Monte Carlo. After that, the SAS team will be able to use the Monte Carlo simulations to predict the performance of the instrument at any point of the parameter space.

The SVAC People