360 Degrees of GLAST

  • Released Friday, September 14, 2007
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GLAST will carry two instruments: the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM). The LAT is GLAST's primary instrument and consists of four components: the Tracker, the Calorimeter, the Anticoincidence Detector (ACD), and the Data Acquisition System (DAQ). These instrument components working together will detect gamma rays by using Einstein's famous equation (E=mc(squared) in a technique known as pair production. The GLAST Burst Monitor is a complementary instrument and consists of low-energy detectors, high-energy detectors, and data processing unit. The GBM can see all directions at once, except for the area where Earth blocks its view. When the GBM detects a bright gamma-ray burst, it immediately sends a signal to the LAT to observe that area of the sky.

Animated fly-around of the Fermi spacecraft against a depiction of the gamma-ray sky. This is a 4k upres of the original frames.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

This beauty shot provides a 360-degree view of the spacecraft without a simulated gamma ray sky.

This beauty shot provides a 360-degree view of the spacecraft with a simulated gamma ray sky.

For More Information

See http://www.nasa.gov/GLAST

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NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

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This page was originally published on Friday, September 14, 2007.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:55 PM EDT.