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August
26, 2008: NASA's newest space telescope, formerly
known as GLAST, has passed its orbital checkout with flying
colors, kicking off a mission to explore the violent and unpredictable
gamma ray universe.
 It's
getting started with a new name: NASA announced today that
GLAST has been renamed the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
in honor of Prof. Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954), a pioneer in
high-energy physics.
Right:
An artist's concept of the newly-minted Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope. [more]
"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 at
NASA Headquarters in Washington. "His theory provides
the foundation for understanding the new phenomena his namesake
telescope will discover."
Scientists
expect Fermi, by observing energetic gamma rays, to discover
many new pulsars, reveal the inner workings of supermassive
black holes, and help physicists search for new laws of Nature.
For
two months following the spacecraft's June 11, 2008, launch,
scientists tested and calibrated its two instruments, the
Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM).
Today,
the Large Area Telescope team 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:
Above:
A portion of Fermi's "first light" map of the gamma-ray
heavens. Click to view the
entire sky.
A
similar image, produced by NASA's now-defunct Compton Gamma-ray
Observatory, took years of observations to produce. With Fermi's
superior sensitivity, new discoveries are sure to follow.
Fermi's
Large Area Telescope scans the entire sky every three hours
when operating in "survey mode," which will occupy
most of the telescope's observing time during the first year
of operations. These fast snapshots let scientists monitor
rapid changes characteristic of the violent gamma-ray universe.
The telescope is sensitive to photons with energies ranging
from 20 MeV (million electron volts) to over 300 GeV (billion
electron volts). The high end of this range, which corresponds
to energies more than 5 million times greater than dental
X-rays, is little explored.
 Right:
This surge of gamma rays, detected by Fermi on July 23rd 2008,
signals the probable destruction of a distant star. [larger
image]
The
spacecraft's secondary instrument, the GBM, spotted 31 explosions
known as gamma-ray bursts in its first month of operations
alone. These high-energy blasts occur when massive stars die
or when orbiting neutron stars spiral together and merge.
The
GBM is sensitive to less energetic gamma rays than the Large
Area Telescope, giving it a complementary view of the broad
gamma-ray spectrum. Working together, the two instruments
may finally unravel some of the knottiest mysteries of gamma-ray
bursts.
"The
past few decades have been a golden age for astronomy,"
says GBM principal investigator Chip Meegan of the Marshall
Space Flight Center. Fermi, he believes, is going to keep
the good times rolling. "I'm delighted to be a part of
it."
Stay
tuned to Science@NASA for more news from Fermi and the gamma-ray
universe.
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Editor: Dr.
Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA
| more
information: |
| Fermi
(GLAST) -- mission home page
A
Violent History of Time -- (Science@NASA) An introduction
to the Fermi mission and the puzzle of Gamma-ray bursts
Above:
A Fermi animation of the Vela pulsar, which beams radiation
every 89 milliseconds as it spins. The pulses are shown
slowed by 20 times. Credit: NASA/DOE/International LAT
Team
NASA's
Fermi mission is an astrophysics and particle physics
partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S.
Department of Energy, along with important contributions
from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany,
Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the U.S.
NASA's
Future: US
Space Exploration Policy
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