TAG | GLAST study of black holes set to launch June 3, 2008 |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Friday, 23 May 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 The window of opportunity for lift-off of the GLAST mission is between 11:45 a.m. and 1:40 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), or between 1545 and 1740 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Its launch pad is located at NASA's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station; specifically, Launch Complex 17. GLAST will be launched from a Delta 7920H-10C rocket. When lifted into orbit, GLAST will attain a circular orbit about the Earth at an altitude of 342 miles (550 kilometers) and at an inclination of 28.5 degrees. The GLAST is the successor to the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), and its Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET), which functioned from 1991 to 1999. (It was safely de-orbited from space on June 4, 2000.) Like its predecessor, the GLAST will be able to detect gamma radiation that is thousands to hundreds of billions of times more energetic than visible light. The energy band used by GLAST extends from 10 MeV (ten mega-electron-volts, or ten million eV) to 300 Gev (three hundred giga-electron-volts, or three hundred billion eV). The GLAST will help astronomers study astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, black holes, blazars, pulsars, dark matter, and other high-energy objects in the Universe. They hope to be able to answer such questions as “What is happening to produce this much energy? What happens to the surrounding environment near these phenomena? How will studying these energetic objects add to our understanding of the very nature of the Universe and how it behaves? [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: “Official NASA Site of GLAST”] More information about the GLAST misison continues on the next page. |
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