First light for space telescope

by stvalentine | August 27, 2008 at 10:48 pm

244 views | 8 Recommendations | 3 comments

A powerful Nasa space telescope launched in June has unveiled its first results - including an image of the sky viewed through "gamma-ray glasses".

Nasa also revealed a new name; the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope has become the Fermi telescope.

The name honours Enrico Fermi - one of the pioneers of high energy physics.

Fermi will study some of the most extreme phenomena in the cosmos, which liberate massive amounts of energy in the form of gamma-rays.

It will scan the sky for massive cosmic explosions, giant black holes that hurl matter across space, and dense neutron stars with powerful magnetic fields.

stvalentine, I like this story. It's good stuff.

Did not know about this. So I share here some of the things I found out for the benefit of other geeky types who may be interested ...

GLAST
... launched 2008-06-11 at 16:05 GMT aboard a Delta II 7920-H rocket. The mission is a joint venture of NASA, the United States Department of Energy, and government agencies in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden. NASA announced 2008-02-08 that it was seeking a new name that would, "capture the excitement of GLAST's mission and call attention to gamma-ray and high-energy astronomy."

GLAST includes two scientific instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM). The LAT is an imaging gamma-ray detector ... which detects photons ... with a field of view of about 20% of the sky; The GBM consists of 14 scintillation detectors ... and can detect gamma ray bursts ... across the whole of the sky not occulted by the Earth. The GBM was constructed at the University of California at Santa Cruz UCSC.

General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems (formerly Spectrum Astro) in Gilbert, Arizona designed and built the spacecraft that carries the instruments. It will travel in a low, circular orbit with a period of about 95 minutes. Its normal mode of operation will maintain its orientation so that the instruments will look away from the earth, with a "rocking" motion to equalize the coverage of the sky. The view of the instruments will sweep out across most of the sky about 16 times per day. The spacecraft can also maintain an orientation that points to a chosen target.

The last sentence is quite telling. Certainly this platform has advanced military applications, which may not be a bad thing, since things like suitcase nukes will certainly be producing levels of gamma radiation which may be detectible by this instrument ...

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0809/10grb/

Naked eye gamma-ray burst was aimed squarely at Earth
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY NEWS RELEASE
Posted: September 10, 2008

BERKELEY -- A flash of light that blinded even small telescopes six months ago was the brightest astronomical explosion ever observed - visible to the naked eye despite originating halfway across the universe.

The gamma-ray burst, catalogued as GRB 080319B, was the result of a massive star's explosion 7.5 billion years ago that sent a pencil-beam of intense light on a direct collision course for Earth. It is the only known gamma-ray burst to have had a visible component bright enough to see with the naked eye.

"This was the brightest optical and infrared event that mankind has ever recorded," said Joshua Bloom, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and first author of an analysis of the event submitted to The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) less than a week after the burst and accepted this week. "When more of these events are detected, we will open up the possibility of studying the infant universe with this new tool."

The gamma-ray burst was first detected by NASA's Swift satellite on March 19, after which many Earth- and space-based telescopes slewed into position to observe the rapidly fading light. Situated within the constellation Bootes, its flash eventually was pinpointed at a distance of about 7.5 billion light years.

. . .

NowPublic

Tech & Biz

Photos