NASA's GLAST space observatory has powered up and started
sending signals back to Earth.
The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope launched
on June 11 and entered an orbit 345 miles (555 km) above Earth. Now one of
its two instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT), has been awakened to begin
streaming data to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's (SLAC) operations
center.
"Powering up the LAT has been even smoother than we
had hoped," said Rob Cameron, operations manager at SLAC. "We're already
receiving high-quality data that we can use to get the instrument ready for the
best science return."
GLAST will use gamma-ray
vision to see the most energetic light in the universe and investigate
extreme environments, such as black holes and pulsars. The space telescope
will also examine the origin of powerful cosmic rays and possibly answer
questions about dark matter.
The GLAST instruments are slated to undergo a 60-day
checkout and calibration period before officially starting the first year of
its mission, when it will do a full-sky survey and quickly respond to any
detected sources of gamma-ray bursts.
"We're off to a great start and we're looking
forward to a new view of our universe once science operations begin," said
Peter Michelson, a principal scientist for LAT at Stanford University in California.
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