GLAST begins its mission
American space agency NASA’s newest observatory, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), has begun its mission of exploring the universe in high-energy gamma rays.
Scientists expect GLAST, space agency’s next generation mission designed to explore the most energetic phenomena of universe, to discover many new pulsars, reveal powerful processes near super-massive black holes at the cores of thousands of active galaxies and enable a search for signs of new physical laws.
The spacecraft and its revolutionary instruments passed their orbital checkout with flying colours, NASA said.
The agency said GLAST has been renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in honour of Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954), a pioneer in high-energy physics.
“Enrico Fermi was the first person to suggest how cosmic particles could be accelerated to high speeds,” said Paul Hertz, chief scientist for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“His theory provides the foundation for understanding the new phenomena his namesake telescope will discover.”
For two months following the spacecraft’s June 11 launch, scientists tested and calibrated its two instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM).
The LAT team has unveiled an all-sky image showing the glowing gas of the Milky Way, blinking pulsars, and a flaring galaxy billions of light-years away. The map combines 95 hours of the instrument’s “first light” observations. A similar image, produced by NASA’s now-defunct Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, took years of observations to produce.
The image shows gas and dust in the plane of the Milky Way glowing in gamma rays due to collisions with accelerated nuclei called cosmic rays. The famous Crab Nebula and Vela pulsars also shine brightly at these wavelengths.
These fast-spinning neutron stars, which form when massive stars die, were originally discovered by their radio emissions. The image’s third pulsar, named Geminga and located in Gemini, is not a radio source. It was discovered by an earlier gamma-ray satellite, NASA said.