GLAST, an ambitious gamma-ray astronomy mission, has been the victim of a seemingly unending series of launch delays… but those may finally be over. GLAST is scheduled to launch no earlier than 11:45 a.m. Eastern time (15:45 UT) Wednesday, June 11. I have no idea if it will actually get off the ground or not, but I’ll be watching just in case. I’ll be live-Twittering the event, and it will be broadcast on NASA TV as well. If I can get my act together tomorrow I might even do a live video stream. We’ll see.
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June 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
There’s a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, which is no surprise for the Cape in summer. Hopefully the T-storms will stay away and GLAST can head off on its mission.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Although I am not at the launch, I had my father pick up my GLAST swag!
June 10th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
I hope the weather holds for the launch!
June 10th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
80miles south of the Cape here…. I’ll look out the front door at 11:45!
(I can usually see all the launches if the cloud cover holds off. It was gorgeous here today until late afternoon, so even with the 50% chance of rain it’s hopeful.)
June 11th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are one of the most astonishing phenomena of “interstellar weather”. We hope that GLAST will furnish us new data of GRBs occurrences. This will help to answer some questions about GRBs’ role in “sterilization” of huge number of planets tens or hundreds of light-years across.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Storms are hitting the central Florida area rather hard. We had plenty of them yesterday (Tuesday).
Hopefully, there’ll be enough of a window to allow GLAST to launch.
These sure are exciting times!
June 11th, 2008 at 4:47 am
The BA asked : “Will GLAST finally set sail Wednesday?”
I sure hope so & wish them all the best!
But ah … wasn’t GLAST going to be renamed too?
Anything happen with that?
June 11th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Someone here recently told me that US (re)naming is after successful launch.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Liftoff was at 2305 EST Wednesday. News reports say they’ll assign a name in a couple of months, from about 1000 suggestions they already have.
What would be a good name? Perhaps after a pioneer in gamma-ray astronomy. No idea who that might be.
I couldn’t find out how the thing works. Can anyone give details?
X-ray telescopes are tricky enough (X-rays go right through glass mirrors and lenses), neutrino telescopes are really detectors made of zillions of gallons of water, but what about gamma-ray scopes?
June 12th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
It seems to be a calorimeter, for the x-rays.. (It has other instruments that complements.)
But it is a “hodoscopic” calorimeter, which seems to mean it can not only decide energy (measured as light intensity from scintillators, not heat as the name calorimeter suggests) but also decide directionality somewhat by using several scintillating crystals.