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Hacking Satellites To Spot Gamma Ray Bursts
mustermark writes: "By reprogramming on the fly some of the instruments on satellites cruising the solar system, astronomers have pieced together an interplanetary "fishing net" to catch gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic explosions known in the cosmos. Lasting only seconds, they briefly outshine the entire universe but disappear before astronomers can get a fix on them. This latest hack, though, lets them triangulate a burst's position in a matter of seconds, catching them in the act."
Sorry, had to get that off my chest. you can go back to reading useful posts now.
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To answer a few people's questions (I'm an astronomer and I've done some research on Gamma Ray Bursts)
l es/709.asp
The system works because the satellites can time the arrival of bursts of gamma rays very accurately (minute fractions of a second, though
it depends on the satellite). Since the gamma rays travel at the speed of light, they arrive at each satellite at a different times, and you can use this information to find the position of the burst in the sky. The timing info is stored and sent back to Earth, so it doesn't matter if there is a lag in sending the info back to Earth.
Since you can't see gamma rays, and each detector doesn't have spatial information, you can't create a picture, but you can create graphs of the gamma rays versus time. Plus, some of the bursts are also seen in visible light, as seen in the picture on the page.
It is true that this system has been around for a while, as it says in the article. But the IPN has become much more important recently with the loss of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which reached the end of its mission and had to be crashed into the atmosphere. See: http://www.starstuff.org/default.asp?cover=/artic
CGRO used to produce nearly daily events, but
now that it is gone, this interplanetary network
will have to step up. Plus, with NEAR, there
is a third satellite, making determination of a unique position possible.
You can see the IPN notices sent out to astronomers here:
http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/ipn/gcn_ipn.html
Actually the gamma-ray burst most often only outshine the whole galaxy, but almost never the universe. Only one time has such a powerful burst been noticed that it momentarily outshone the whole universe. That threw quite a few theories back to the drawing board!
Article about it for example here.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
I recently attended a lecture at Los Alamos National Laboratory on gamma ray bursts, and discovered that scientists have had this technology for some time. From the time a satellite detects a gamma ray burst and pinpoints its position and transmits a signal to an automatic ground-based telescope, to the time the ground-based telescope swings around and points at the gamma ray burster is six seconds. And this has been around for a while. Nothing new.
Now if this latest technology improves that time, then that would be interesting.
This is a private discussion board, and Rob has every right to dictate when his open posting policy has been pushed too far. There are limits to free speech. You can not yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, and you do not have the right to drown out serious discussion on a private messaging system.
The communications that take place on /. are of the utmost importance in how we develop our Open Source initiatives, and require an atmosphere of absolutely scholarly respect in order for us to be successful. Trolling detracts from this so much that we are left unable to continue our conversations.
I was a part of the group that was drowned out by the Natalie-thon" last month, and it completely wrecked the discussions my colleagues and I were having. We could not post so much as a single sentence w/out suffering the childish ridicule of these trolls.
ENOUGH I say! We have suffered for too long already. File your suit, Andover. The true community of slashdot is 100% behind you.
They haven't discovered only one. There's thirteen recorded gamma ray bursts on record. They're exceedingly rare, though, so you'll never see an astrophysicist more excited than when a gamma ray burst is detected.
Go read the article, it's not "hacking". That is just what the author of the story put because he doesn't know better. It's accually a complex system that they have been /very/ slowly adding pieces to. The author called it hacking possibly because the sensors for detecting these blasts are piggy-backed on other satalites. It's quite a complex system how they detect, send information back to earth, and possition radio telescopes to detect the few second blasts. If the author is out there and reading this, why don't you tell us why you call this "hacking"? It's a fairly complex system that has been worked in since 1978!
I'm suprised things like this haven't been implemented more recently. it seems trivial to have multiple detectors on arbitrary geosync satelites and earth based installations. I'd think that you get three or so opposite geosync satelites and a few earth installations all actively looking for anomalies such as these (I'm thinking other bursts too that might be quick) and triangulation would be trivial - and even a relatively laggy connection such as simple email could be quick enough to alert the correct people.
...
now the question is, is this really big news? I'm not so sure anymore.
--onyx--
Two points:
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Actually, according to this sciam article, they already located one gamma ray burst....
Also possibly of interest is yesterdays astronomy picture of the day.
leave it up to nasa to spend billions of dollars in spacecraft that they crash into planets (or moons, or just lose completely) and simultaneously use a hacked together string of satellites (which have a completely unrelated reason to be in space) to do anything of any real value. YAY NASA!
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Black holes colliding?
Hypernovas?
Or just Tarkin demonstrating the Death Star, the Ultimate Power in the Universe?
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