As reported in a “BBC News Article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6249721.stm today, the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, is getting set to launch this fall. This is the culmination of about ten years of hard work by hundreds of engineers, postdocs, students, professors, and funding agencies. NASA and the Department of Energy have a cooperative hand in this project; NASA handles the space-readiness (engineering) and launch aspects of the mission, while particle physicists (DOE) handle the detector design and construction and, eventually, the data analysis.
SLAC is a central site for the efforts on GLAST, and was responsible for the “LAT”, a primary instrument on the experiment with a lot in common with the BaBar detector. In fact, many of the best BaBar colleagues originally responsible for the health and well-being of central trigger and electronics systems migrated to GLAST to meet similar challenges on that project.
GLAST will probe what I refer to as “high-energy, low rate” phenomenda. Particle colliders deliver millions of events per second, but at energies between 1-1000 GeV (where 1 GeV is equivalent to the energy bound in a proton at rest, or in its mass). Comparatively, the universe generates phenomena with prefixes yet unheard by most of the average populate. “Peta” and “Exa” are common utterances in the halls of cosmic ray and neutrino experiments, referring to energies of 1,000,000-1,000,000,000 GeV. However, these events occur perhaps once a year, and catching them is crucial.
GLAST will do this. 2007 will mark the start of the LHC, and the launch of GLAST. What better sign of the growing synergy between traditional particle physics and traditional astrophysics approaches to understanding the universe?
