Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope—the GRB Watchdog
“This burst was a whopper,” said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It blows away every gamma ray burst we’ve seen so far.”
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Constantly observing the gamma-ray sky, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is Swift’s GRB watchdog of the sky for the X-Ray Telescope and the Ultra-Violet and Optical Telescope. And on March 19, 2008, the most powerful stellar explosion was picked up by NASA’s Swift satellite, with the explosion caused by a gamma ray burst—caused by massive stars running out of nuclear fuel.
Picked up at 2:12 a.m. EDT, Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope pinpointed the constellation Bootes coordinates, the second gamma ray burst detected on March 19, 2008—accurately named GRB 080319B. Two other telescopes of Swift, the X-ray Telescope and the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, in addition to several ground-based telescopes and people with their naked eye, saw its afterglow. The Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas measured the gamma ray burst ’s redshift, or measurement of the distance to an object, at 0.94 or 7.5 billion light years ago.
Gamma ray GRB 080319B’s viewing was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova that has been ever recorded. Up until now, the nearby galaxy M33 was the closest object seen by the naked eye, a short 2.9 million light-years from Earth. Right now, an analysis of the newly viewed gamma ray is just now being done, so very little is known about it. This bright gamma ray was one of four observed in one day.
Swift was built and operated with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and General Dynamics in the U.S.; the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Sciences Laboratory in the United Kingdom; Brera Observatory and the Italian Space Agency in Italy; plus partners in Germany and Japan.
Also managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center out of Maryland, about 6.5 miles northeast of Washington, D.C., the GSFC is a major U.S. laboratory that is used for developing and operating unmanned scientific spacecraft. Many of NASA’s Earth Observation, Astronomy, and Space Physics missions are controlled at GSFC, accounting to over 200 missions operated by NASA. Goddard Space Flight is also the sight of several major contractors for NASA:
Honeywell Technologies
Lockheed Martin Corp.
Northrup Grumman Space & Mission
Swales and Associates
Raytheon Information Systems
QSS Group,Inc.
Science Systems Applications
Boeing Satellite Systems
TRW Inc.
Ball Aerospace and Tech. Corp.
SGT Inc.
Mantech System Engineering Group
Northrup Grumman Systems Corp.
TRAX International
PRC Inc.
ITT Industries, Inc.
Spectrum Astro
Cube Corp.
Science Application International Corp.
Parsons Infrastructure and Tech.
Averstar Inc.
Computer Sciences Corp.
ITT Corp.
Indus Corp.
LB&B Associates
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 3:12 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
