If you think of the heavens as a peaceful place, with planets revolving around stars in timeless, predictable patterns, NASA plans to launch a $690 million space telescope next week could change your mind.
Managed by scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) will spend five to 10 years probing things that blow up and crash into each other: gamma rays that explode, cosmic rays that bombard us and jets of energy that shoot out of black holes and speed through space in mystifying patterns.
Astronomers hope to shed light on some of the most powerful forces in the universe - and shatter stereotypes in the process, NASA officials say.
"We look out into space and see stars shining and think of the universe as a static place, but it isn't. In this gamma ray region, things are going off and exploding and just speeding away, all in seconds," said Kevin Grady, GLAST's Goddard-based project manager.
Nine feet high and 8 feet in diameter, GLAST will orbit 350 miles above the Earth, surveying the entire sky every three hours as it examines objects - invisible to the naked eye - that generate gamma ray emissions, the form of light with the highest energy.
"We're covering an energy range that almost hasn't been explored," said David J. Thompson, deputy project scientist and an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard. "We say we're working on the extremes of the universe. Gamma rays are the extreme."
Being in orbit will minimize the effects of the charged particles that surround Earth and would create unwanted static for GLAST's instruments: a monitor to detect gamma ray bursts and a large-area telescope to study them.
Every three hours, a solid-state recorder will transmit data to Goddard by way of a satellite and a terminal in White Sands, N.M. Data from the monitor will be processed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., while telescope readings will be processed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif.
GLAST's flight operations and mission control center will be based at Goddard, where about 50 engineers and technicians will oversee the launch and initial operations. All but about a dozen staff members will eventually be assigned to other NASA projects once the instruments are fully operating, Grady said.
"We control the satellite here," he said.
