'Extreme Physics' Observatory Ready for Final Assembly

The primary instrument for NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) arrived at General Dynamics, Scottsdale, Ariz., on September 18 for mounting onto the spacecraft.

The instrument, called the Large Area Telescope, successfully completed four months of vigorous testing last week at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, to ensure it can withstand the rigors of launch and operations in space.

"GLAST is a remarkable undertaking, a partnership between astronomers and physicists," said Peter Michelson, GLAST principal investigator at Stanford University, Calif. "We are eagerly anticipating a new understanding of the connections between the large and small, between the most energetic phenomena in the universe and the subatomic world."

The observatory will detect light billions of times more energetic than what our eyes can see or what optical telescopes can detect. Key targets include powerful particle jets emanating from enormous black holes and possibly the theorized collisions of dark matter particles. The Large Area Telescope will be at least 30 times more sensitive than previous gamma-ray detectors and will have a far greater field of view.

"The Large Area Telescope is a unique and beautiful new instrument for science, and it will provide a tremendous leap forward in our ability to study the most energetic objects and phenomena in space," said Steven Ritz, project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Unlike visible light, gamma rays are too energetic to be focused by traditional telescope mirrors onto a detector. The Large Area Telescope will employ detectors that convert incoming gamma rays into electrons and their antimatter partners, called positrons. This technique, a change of light into matter as described by Einstein's equation E=mc^2, is called pair conversion. It will enable scientists to track the direction of gamma rays and measure their energy.

The Large Area Telescope was assembled at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif., from subsystems developed by an international team from Italy, Japan, France, Sweden and the United States.

The second main instrument, the GLAST Burst Monitor, arrived in Scottsdale, Ariz., in July and is currently being integrated onto the spacecraft. The GLAST Burst Monitor was built at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., in collaboration with scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany, working with NASA through an agreement with the German Aerospace Center.

GLAST is scheduled to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla. in fall 2007.

Source: NASA

Related stories:

Swift Catches Farthest Ever Gamma-Ray Burst
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Swift satellite has found the most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected. The blast, designated GRB 080913, arose from an exploding star 12.8 billion light-years away.
1843 stellar eruption may be new type of star explosion
Eta Carinae, the galaxy's biggest, brightest and perhaps most studied star after the sun, has been keeping a secret: Its giant outbursts appear to be driven by an entirely new type of stellar explosion that is fainter than a typical supernova and does not destroy the star.
A clash of clusters provides another clue to dark matter
New Hubble and Chandra observations of the cluster known as MACSJ0025.4-1222 indicate that a titanic collision has separated dark from ordinary matter. This provides independent confirmation of a similar effect detected previously in a target dubbed the Bullet Cluster, showing that the Bullet Cluster is not an anomalous case.
GLAST Observatory reveals entire gamma-ray sky
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's newest space telescope is giving scientists their best look yet at the highest-energy gamma ray bursts generated by violent events in space. For Toby Burnett, a University of Washington physics professor, it's a welcome payoff for 13 long years of work.
Spectrograph Team Awaits October Hubble Servicing Mission
A $70 million instrument designed by the University of Colorado at Boulder that will be inserted on the Hubble Space Telescope during an October 2008 servicing mission should help astronomers better understand how galaxies, stars and planets evolved.


NASA GLAST Burst Monitor Powers Up Successfully
NASA’s GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) Instrument Operations Center in Huntsville, Ala., the focal point for observing gamma ray bursts, was alive with energy as scientists gathered to witness instrument activation the evening of June 25. The GBM team linked in with GLAST mission operations at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., by teleconference and studied a big screen projecting spacecraft information live.
The mouse that roared: pipsqueak star unleashes monster flare
On April 25, NASA’s Swift satellite picked up the brightest flare ever seen from a normal star other than our Sun. The flare, an explosive release of energy from a star, packed the power of thousands of solar flares. It would have been visible to the naked eye if the star had been easily observable in the night sky at the time.
A Super Solar Flare
At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.

News discussion:

Physics news