GLAST Progress

[Dave Thompson <djt@egret.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Gamma-Ray Multiwavelength Colleagues,

GLAST has reached another milestone: the Large Area Telescope has 
been delivered to the spacecraft contractor, General 
Dynamics/Spectrum Astro, in Arizona.

The attached photo shows the LAT just before shipping from the Naval 
Research Laboratory, where it recently completed a full set of 
environmental tests.

The GLAST Burst Monitor hardware is already being installed on the 
spacecraft.   Lots of work remains.  Nevertheless, the plan for a 
launch next Fall (2007) seems solid.

In the process of preparing for GLAST science, the First GLAST 
Symposium will be held at Stanford University 5-8 Feb., 2007.  The 
Web site is http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/symposium/2007/   Here 
is the purpose statement from that location:
This is the first meeting in the series of International GLAST 
Symposia. The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, GLAST, is a 
mission to discover and study cosmic gamma-ray sources in the energy 
range 20 MeV to >300 GeV, with supporting measurements for gamma-ray 
bursts from 10 keV to 25 MeV. With its launch in Fall 2007, GLAST 
will open a new and important window on a wide variety of high-energy 
phenomena, including black holes and active galactic nuclei; 
gamma-ray bursts; pulsars; the origin of cosmic rays and their 
relation to supernova remnants; probes of the optical-UV EBL; new 
source classes; solar physics; and searches for signals of 
hypothetical new phenomena such as particle dark matter 
annihilations, extra dimensions, Lorentz invariance violation, and 
other relics from the Big Bang. The first Guest Investigator Cycle 
will start in 2007, with proposals due soon after the Symposium. More 
information about the mission can be found at 
<http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov>http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov and at links 
therein. The first Symposium will focus on the new scientific 
investigations enabled by GLAST, mission and instrument 
characteristics, analysis tools and opportunities for guest 
investigators, and coordinated observations and analyses. It is 
expected that the second Symposium will occur approximately 18 months later.
Steve Ritz, the GLAST Project Scientist, will be starting a 
newsletter with updated information about GLAST.  He will be using 
names from this mailing list as part of his distribution, so you can 
look forward to regular updates as launch approaches.

I hope to see many of you at the GLAST Symposium in February,

Dave Thompson

LAT_shipping_base.jpg