CAPE CANAVERAL, FL - A United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral today to orbit the most complex and capable gamma ray observatory ever sent into space. NASA's Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope will study the most energetic events to occur in the known universe.
VIDEO: DR. RITZ POSTLAUNCH COMMENTS VIDEO: DR. RITZ ON THE BEACH AFTER LAUNCH VIDEO: LAUNCH DIRECTOR OMAR BAEZ DESCRIBES THE LAUNCH VIDEO: GLAST SEPARATES FROM THE DELTA SECOND STAGE VIDEO: LAUNCH REPLAYS VIDEO: LIFTOFF OF GLAST! VIDEO: SPLIT SCREEN VIEWS OF LAUNCH VIDEO: OUR VIEW OF LAUNCH FROM THE BEACH VIDEO: LAUNCH ANIMATION VIDEO: DR. JULIE MENERY, GLAST DEP. PROJECT MANAGER VIDEO: THE MOBILE SERVICE TOWER ROLLS AWAY FROM THE ROCKET BEFORE LAUNCH VIDEO: ROB PINKERTON, GENERAL DYNAMICS TECHNICAL PROJECT MANAGER VIDEO: BRUCE REID, KSC GLAST MISSION MANAGER ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: WATCH AND DOWNLOAD EXTENDED LAUNCH REPLAYS ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: WATCH PART 1 OF THE LAUNCH BROADCAST FROM THE BEGINNING THROUGH THE COAST PHASE (2 1/2 HOURS) ALL-ACCESS SUBSCRIBERS: WATCH PART 2 OF THE LAUNCH BROADCAST THROUGH SPACECRAFT SEPARATION (31 MINUTES) WATCH THE LAUNCH IN HI-DEF: 1080i WATCH THE LAUNCH IN HI-DEF: 720p WATCH THE LAUNCH IN HI-DEF: 480i READ: GLAST MISSION BOOK READ: GLAST BROCHURE READ: GLAST 101 READ: SCIENCE WRITER'S GUIDE READ: GLASTTIMELINE READ: ACRONYMS READ: GLOSSARY IMAGES: GLAST PHOTO GALLERY Launch was delayed 20 minutes when equipment at the downrange tracking station on the island of Antigua went down. That minor headache was the only in what was a textbook countdown, and at 12:05 p.m. EDT, the first stage main engine and 9 solid rocket boosters of the Delta 2 Heavy launch vehicle roared to life to begin its mission to place GLAST in orbit 350 miles above the Earth. The 81st successful Delta launch in a row deployed GLAST in its intended orbit 75 minutes after launch. Twelve minutes later, GLAST deployed its solar arrays and began collecting power generating rays from the Sun. "The entire GLAST Team is elated the observatory is now on-orbit and all systems continue to operate as planned," said GLAST program manager Kevin Grady of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. GLAST won't be studying gamma ray events quite yet. The spacecraft still has a checkout and commissioning period for the next couple months. "After a 60-day checkout and initial calibration period, we'll begin science operations," said Steve Ritz, GLAST Project Scientist Steve Ritz of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "GLAST soon will be telling scientists about many new objects to study, and this information will be available on the internet for the world to see." GLAST is a more powerful follow on to one of NASA's "Great Observatories", the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which had an appropriately stellar career for 9 years following its deployment from the space shuttle in 1991. GLAST was developed as a more powerful and sensitive telescope to the highly sucessful Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. It's able to examine a broader electromagnetic spectrum and a has much wider field of view than CGRO. GLAST is able to see a spectral frequency range that spans a factor of 10 million and can see 1/5 of the sky at a time. The expanded field of view opens up new possibilities for observing celestial events on a broad scale spanning millions of light years across. In fact, in only three orbits of the Earth, GLAST will be able to scan the entire sky along the solar and galactic planes. Like CGRO, GLAST will study a wide variety of astronomical objects and phenomena, but according to Ritz, "Active galactic nuclei will be GLAST's bread and butter. There are guaranteed results." Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are galaxies with extraordinarily luminous cores with large black holes millions of times more massive than our Sun. As gas and intergalactic material is pulled in and trapped by a monster black hole's gravity, it settles into an accretion disk and starts to spiral downward. Before the material the so-called event horizon, the black hole's outer boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape, the material generates a vast outburst of electromagnetic radiation. Radio, optical, and X-ray telescopes have resolved jets shooting away from galactic cores in opposite directions. The material in these jets can rip across space at more than 99% the speed of light, and some jets remain tightly gathered for hundreds of thousands of light-years. "We don't know what the jets are made of or how they are produced. It is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of astrophysics. But jets are the link between the activity of the supermassive black hole and the AGN's surrounding environment in intergalactic space," says Peter Michelson of Stanford University in California, who is the Principal Investigator of GLAST's primary science instrument, the Large Area Telescope (LAT). The LAT will probably detect gamma rays from different types of AGN, such as radio galaxies, Seyfert galaxies, quasars, and blazars. But the biggest interest may lie with blazars, which are thought to be active galactic nuclei whose black holes aim their jets almost directly at Earth. By studying the energy spectra and variability of gamma rays and other wavelengths of light coming from blazars, the LAT instrument should be able to determine the composition of the jets, establishing whether they are dominated by electrons and positrons (the antimatter counterpart of electrons), or by protons. "When GLAST detects a blazar, it is monitoring violent activity from a black hole taking place in the distant past," says GLAST Interdisciplinary Scientist Charles Dermer of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "Understanding gamma rays from these sources is a form of black hole archeology that reveals the high-energy history of our Universe." Along with AGN's, GLAST will study an energy range that will allow science team members to make sensitive tests of fundamental physics. For example, GLAST will be able to test whether light travels at the same speed in a vacuum regardless of wavelength. According to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, all electromagnetic radiation should travel at the same speed, 186,282.4 miles per second. In other words, high-energy gamma-ray photons should speed across space at exactly the same speed as low-energy radio photons. But some models of quantum gravity, which attempt to merge Einstein's general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics, predict that extremely high-energy gamma rays could travel at a slightly different speed than other forms of light. "GLAST may be able to test this prediction by running a very long race of 10 billion light-years," says GLAST Project Scientist Steve Ritz of NASA Goddard. If very-high-energy gamma rays from GRBs preferentially arrive at Earth slightly ahead of or behind low-energy gamma rays, this could indicate a violation in the principle that all light travels at the same speed in a vacuum. "If this happens, and if we can exclude more mundane astrophysical explanations, this would be a huge discovery," says Ritz. "GLAST would truly carry us beyond Einstein." (The Spacearium / SpaceflightNews.net)
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