Speaker
Dr
Luca Baldini
Description
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is a next generation high-energy gamma-ray observatory designed to explore the sky over more than four energy decades (20 MeV--300 GeV) with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. The Large Area Telescope (LAT), the main instrument on board GLAST, is a pair conversion telescope designed and built exploiting the state of the art in high-energy physics detector technology; a significant fraction of the advance in sensitivity (roughly a factor of 30) over the predecessor CGRO-EGRET instrument, is in fact accomplished by means of the largest and by far most complex (70 square meters of Silicon Strip Detectors for a total of almost 1 million of channels) Silicon Tracker ever built for a space mission. With the launch date now firmly established for the beginning of June 2008, this is a particularly exciting moment for the whole collaboration. The first two months of operation will be devoted to a carefully planned calibration activity, which will prepare the instrument for the real science data taking phase, continuing over the following 5--10 years. The operation experiences, as well as the highlights from this initial on-orbit verification phase, will be presented in this talk.
Author
Dr
Luca Baldini
