TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  789
SUBJECT: False GRB alarm from RXTE/ASM on 8 Sept 2000
DATE:    00/09/11 14:27:37 GMT
FROM:    Don Smith at MIT  <dasmith@space.mit.edu>

iD. A. Smith (UofMich) and A. M. Levine (MIT) report on behalf of the
ASM team at MIT:

For those of you who received the RXTE_ASM TRANSIENT RAPID POSITION
NOTICE over the GCN on Fri Sep 8 at 14:00:27 GMT, you should know that
the ASM seems to have developed a systematic error in the data
analysis pipeline.  This error leads to known sources being
misidentified as new, unknown, TOO sources, with associated error
boxes that tend to cross, triggering the automatic alert system.  The
ASM team is working to identify and correct this error, and in the
meantime we have disabled the automatic alert distribution function.
We hope this false alarm did not cause too much confusion, and that
there was enough information in the alert (such as the fact that there
was no short-term variability in the ASM time-series data) and the
associated web page (such as the extremely large error box) for you to
have made a productive evaluation of the situation.