Life as a Physicist

GLAST – The Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope — is a high energy physics detector in space. Really! It has a calorimeter in it. It has a Silicon detector in it. It has a multi-level trigger in it. All of this has to work in outer space (which is very cool).

GLAST’s mission is multi-fold, but one of the big ones is gamma ray bursts which accompany (and often precede) some spectacular events like a star going super nova.

Toby Burnett, a professor I work with here at UW, has been working on GLAST for years now. Each year the launch gets delayed a bit. Now it is so close it makes no sense to delay it any longer. And check out this picture — the instrument has been put on the space craft! That means it is basically ready for launch. And it is just such a cool picture…

I was going to say they still had to wrap it in tin foil… but I guess not.