Astroparticle Physics Missions & Programs
Current
Fermi (formerly GLAST) is a major observatory that launched on June 11, 2008. Fermi was built to measure the cosmic gamma-ray flux over the energy
range 20 MeV - >300 GeV, with supporting measurements for gamma-ray bursts
down to ~10 keV. With its large leap in key capabilities, Fermi has opened a
new and important window on a wide variety of high energy phenomena,
including black holes and active galactic nuclei; gamma-ray bursts;
pulsars; supernova remnants and the origin of cosmic rays; and is searching for
hypothetical new phenomena such as supersymmetric dark matter annihilations,
violations of Lorentz invariance, and exotic relics from the Big Bang. Julie McEnery is the Project Scientist; Neil Gehrels, Elizabeth Hays, and Dave Thompson are Deputy Project Scientists. Data and analysis tools have been released to the science community through the Fermi
Science Support Center (FSSC), located at Goddard; the primary liason with
the community is Chris Shrader. Other FSSC scientists are Jerry Bonnell, Robin Corbet, Dave Davis, Elizabeth Ferrara, Masa Hirayama, and Valerie Connaughton (located at Marshall), as well as a number of postdoctoral scientists and graduate students. The Anti-Coincidence Detector (ACD) for the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on Fermi was developed in
the ASD. Alex Moiseev is the ACD Instrument Lead Scientist and Dave
Thompson is the ACD Subsystem Manager and LAT multiwavelength
coordinator. Theorists Floyd Stecker and Alice Harding are also part
of the Fermi-LAT team. Steve Ritz (now at UCSC) was the LAT Instrument
Scientist and the previous Project Scientist. Stan Hunter and Bob Hartman (emeritus) are members of the Fermi-LAT team.
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Swift: The Swift satellite was launched in November 2004. It has three instruments, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) developed at Goddard, the X-Ray Telescope (XRT) and the UV-Optical Telescope (UVOT). The BAT is a highly sensitive, large field-of-view instrument designed to provide critical Gamma Ray Burst triggers and 4-arcmin positions. It is a coded aperture imaging instrument with a 1.4 steradian field-of-view (half coded). The energy range is 15-150 keV for imaging with a non-coded response up to 500 keV. Within several seconds of detecting a burst, the BAT will calculate an initial position, decide whether the burst merits a spacecraft slew and, if so, send the position to the spacecraft. The Swift PI is Neil Gehrels, the BAT lead is Scott Barthelmy, the ground system manager is Frank Marshall, the Science Support Center lead is Padi Boyd and the HEASARC lead is Lorella Angelini. ASD scientists on the Swift mission are Lorella Angelini, Scott Barthelmy, Wayne Baumgartner, Padi Boyd, Tom Cline, Neil Gehrels,Stephen Holland, Stefan Immler, Hans Krimm, Craig Markwardt, Frank Marshall, Richard Mushotzky, Judy Racusin, Taka Sakamoto, Gerry Skinner, Nora Troja, Jack Tueller, and Nick White. The Swift Science Support Center is in the ASD and the data are archived in the HEASARC.
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The Astroparticle Physics Lab and the X-ray Astrophysics Lab have collaborated on InFOCUS, a balloon-borne instrument incorporating recent breakthroughs in focusing optics and detectors to achieve order of magnitude improvements in both hard x-ray sensitivity and imaging resolution, with high resolution spectroscopy. This instrument will pioneer the extension into the hard x-ray energy range of the power of focusing optics that has revolutionized x-ray astronomy with missions like ROSAT and ASCA. InFOCuS has flown successfully in 2001 and 2004. The InFOCuS PI is Jack Tueller. Co-I's include ASD's S. D. Barthelmy, N. Gehrels, H. Krimm, K.-W. Chan, R. Petre, P. Serlemitsos, Y. Soong, and N. White.
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Other current missions/programs include:
ACE,
BESS,
CAPRICE,
DDF,
EPACT,
GCN (Gamma-ray burst Coordinates Network),
IMAX,
INTEGRAL,
NIGHTGLOW,
OWL,
PAMELA,
POEMS, and
WIND: TGRS
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Other future missions/programs include:
ACCESS,
the
Beyond Einstein program,
Constellation-X,
EXIST,
LISA (see the AstroGravS archive), and
STEREO (IMPACT instrument)
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Past
CGRO,
GRIS, and
ISOMAX.
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