A team led by scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is developing a burst monitor to fly on the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST).
GLAST will be launched in 2005, succeeding the Compton gamma-ray observatory, which was de-orbited in June.
The GLAST burst monitor, which is part of the spacecraft's large area telescope, is intended to provide the broadest energy coverage available on a single spacecraft for gamma-ray studies.
"We want to discover how these bursts light up the universe with such a tremendous amount of energy," says Dr Charles Meegan, a Marshall Center astrophysicist and principal investigator for the GLAST project.
"Gamma-ray bursts are still one of the greatest mysteries of astrophysics. The total amount of energy emitted by all the stars in our galaxy is not as much energy as that released by one gamma-ray burst in a few seconds."
In 10s, a gamma-ray burst can discharge thousands of times more energy than the sun will give off in its entire lifetime. Meegan says the GLAST burst monitor will observe most of the energy released by a burst, while the primary telescope will detect the highest energy gamma rays emitted during the blast.
Source: Flight International