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."

Comments

Picky little complaint about semantics

[turg]

If it's not in orbit, it's not a satellite.

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. you can go back to reading useful posts now.

========

Re:Picky little complaint about semantics

[ChrisDolan]

If it's not in orbit, it's not a satellite.

All the spacecraft mentioned in the article are in orbit around either the Earth or the Sun. Thus, they are all satellites.

Chris Dolan

Not news ...

[Myrrh]

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 NOT hacking, read the article.

[brandon]

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!

Already done

[QuMa]

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

[gtx]

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!