On June 11, 2008 — three years ago today — NASA launched the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope into orbit:

Fermi — as it was renamed once it reached orbit, after the great Italian scientist Enrico Fermi — is designed to observe gamma rays, the highest energy flavor of light. Gamma rays are only emitted from the most violent events in the universe: black holes gobbling down matter, exploding stars, antimatter particles annihilating each other, and so on. Fermi surveys the sky day after day, returning gobs of data to waiting scientists.

I was involved with Fermi when it was still called GLAST. Long before launch, I signed on to do education and public outreach for GLAST at Sonoma State University. Along with our team, I wrote web pages and helped create educational activities — including classroom lessons, a card game, a paper model of GLAST, a planetarium show, a PBS NOVA episode… we even built a small observatory near the University to augment GLAST observations! You can find all this on the SSU Fermi website.

Fermi has been a very successful mission, and I’m proud to have done my small part for it. And I guess I’m still doing it; technically, writing this blog post is EPO. So happy birthday, Fermi! You’ll always be GLAST in my heart.

- What is GLAST?
- Fermi sees the gamma-ray sky for the first time
- Pulsar SMASH!
- GORT bags a burst
- The hulking sky
- Fermi smooths out space

This news came out a little while ago but I didn’t cover it at the time, and it’s cool enough that it deserves to be covered. I got it from my friends with NASA’s Fermi satellite outreach group. I used to work on Fermi outreach before the satellite launched and was still called GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope), and it was fun trying to come up with lesson plans and educational efforts based on gamma rays (the Hulk came up a lot).

Anyway, one thing Fermi can do is measure the exact time when high-energy gamma rays hit its detectors. Not too long ago, photons from a distant explosion slammed into Fermi, and it found that all these photons arrived essentially simultaneously from the event, irrespective of their energies.

So what? So, Einstein was right. Check it out for yourself:

Basically, the idea is that some quantum mechanics theories propose that space is irregular, foamy, and bumpy on incredibly small scales, and this means the speed at which photons travel may change very slightly if they are more or less energetic. The difference is so small that it takes very long trips to detect it — imagine two cars traveling at 50 versus 50.5 kph: after a few seconds you’ll hardly see any difference, but over an hour they’re separated by half a kilometer. So the longer the trip, the easier it is to measure.

After 7 billion years, if those specific QM theories are right, two photons should arrive at very different times, but Fermi found that the high energy gamma rays hit Fermi less than a second after the low energy ones. This means that space really is smooth, or at smooth at scales smaller than predicted by those quantum theories. QM is still a solid model for the Universe — after all, solar panels, computers, and nuclear bombs do work — but this means that we need to rethink certain aspects of them.

I love hearing stuff like this. We have lots of ideas on how the Universe works, but we need observations of the Universe to know if we’re traveling down the correct path or not. Fermi has shown us that some of these paths lead to dead ends, and we need to look elsewhere for our journey to continue. And I will guarantee that not only will that journey go on, but we’ll find ever-more roads to investigate as we travel.

The naming of names for astronomical satellites is a funny game. Most are weird acronyms (WFPC, STIS, NICMOS are all Hubble cameras), which many times are puns on the mission itself (FAST). Some are named simply, after astronomers who contributed to the field of study (Chandra, Spitzer). The Swift satellite is not an acronym or named after anyone. It’s just a swift satellite.

Right now, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope is very close to launch. But "GLAST" is not the best name. I worked on the education and public outreach for the mission for years, and sometimes the hardest part was using that name (though it made for some fun puns; I wrote articles like "The GLAST Resort"). Because of the picture we used a lot for GLAST, shown on the left, I called it the "flying cheese block".

It’s time to rename GLAST into something cool. And NASA wants you to help.

Got an idea for a new name for GLAST? Send it to NASA (through Sonoma State University)! There are some things you need to know, though. For example, it’s a gamma-ray observatory, so if you want to name it after some gamma ray pioneer, they can’t still be alive (that’s a NASA tradition). The name should be catchy, but not too silly (it’s a $350 million mission that’s managed by both NASA and the Department of Energy, so some modicum of decorum is necessary). It needs to be simple, and easy to say (so Mxyzpltlk is out, even if you try to say it backwards).

I actually don’t have too many ideas. Jan van Paradijs was a beloved astronomer who worked on gamma-ray astrophysics, but his name is too hard to spell for most Americans. Maybe some variation on it?

Please, no Mr. Spaceypants. It doesn’t matter anyway; this isn’t a vote or a contest, just a way to suggest cool names for the mission.

To get you started: GLAST will look at high-energy radiation from black holes, active galaxies, gamma-ray bursts, antimatter annihilation, and even from solar flares. If you go the acronym route, GR is not a bad combo for some good words (can we get GROK out of it? OGRE?). Gamma rays are Super High Energy, too. Also, it’s not a traditional telescope, either.

The deadline is March 31, 2008. So get thinking! Post your suggestions in the comments. Let’s see what we can come up with!