'Extreme Physics' Observatory Prepares for Flight

Scientists and engineers have completed assembly of the primary instrument for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, a breakthrough orbiting observatory scheduled to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in fall 2007.

The main instrument, called the Large Area Telescope, arrived on May 14, 2006, at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington for environmental testing.

The mission, led by NASA with the Department of Energy and international partners, brings together the astrophysics and particle physics communities.

"With GLAST, physicists will gain valuable information about the evolution of the universe and physicists will search for signals that may even force revision of some of the basic laws of physics," said the telescope's principal investigator, Peter Michelson of Stanford University. "The completion of the Large Area Telescope assembly and its shipment from the accelerator center are major milestones in its development."

The observatory will detect light billions of times more energetic than what our eyes can see or what optical telescopes such as Hubble 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 relative range of light energies that the instrument can detect is thousands of times wider than that of an optical telescope, which captures only a thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum," said Project Scientist Steven Ritz of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "The observatory provides a huge leap in capabilities in this important energy band, and it opens a wide window for exploration and discovery."

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 telescope will now undergo three grueling months of ‘shake and bake’ testing to ensure it will survive the intense vibration and noise during launch and operate properly in space. Electromagnetic interference tests also will be performed to ensure Large Area Telescope operations do not interfere with the spacecraft. When testing is finished at the Naval Research Laboratory, the instrument will be shipped to Arizona, where engineers at General Dynamics C4 Systems will integrate the Large Area Telescope and a second instrument, the Burst Monitor, onto the spacecraft.

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, by Susan Hendrix

Related stories:

GLAST Burst Monitor Team Hard at Work Fine Tuning Instrument and Operations
(PhysOrg.com) -- While only on orbit for 40 days and still in the process of a two-month checkout, NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST) has already detected 12 powerful gamma-ray bursts, an encouraging harbinger of good things to come for this mission. The gamma-ray bursts were detected by the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM), one of two instruments on the spacecraft.
Hubble Instruments Slated for On-Orbit 'Surgery'
When astronauts visit the Hubble Space Telescope in October 2008 for its final servicing mission, they will be facing a task that has no precedence – performing on-orbit ‘surgery’ on two ailing science instruments that reside inside the telescope – the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).
James Webb Space Telescope full-scale model coming to COSPAR meeting in Montreal
The full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope resumes its world tour with a stop in Montreal. The model will be on display July 13 - 20 in conjunction with the 37th Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Scientific Assembly.
Seeing the universe through gamma-ray eyes
The scientists have stopped holding their breath. Three weeks after the launch of the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), researchers from Stanford University, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and elsewhere have shaken awake the scientific instruments aboard their $690 million satellite, 350 miles above Earth, for the first time. And everything's working.
Open clusters like Orion have low fertility rate
A detailed survey of stars in the Orion Nebula has found that fewer than 10 percent have enough surrounding dust to make Jupiter-sized planets, according to a report by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
GLAST mission operations at NASA Goddard powered up
Several bases of operations for NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) are gearing up for data from the recently launched satellite.
NASA Goddard mission approved to probe matter in extreme environments
An instrument to study the extreme environments of the universe has been given the "green light" from NASA Headquarters. The High-Resolution Soft X-Ray Spectrometer (SXS) was one of the two science proposals recently selected by NASA for the Explorer Program Mission of Opportunity investigations, and is managed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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.

News discussion:

Physics news