The Fermi Large Area Telescope
Neil Gehrels (October 3, 1952 - February 6, 2017)
We will miss you. Thank you for all that you have done for us.
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The 2012 American Physical Society's W. H. K. Panofsky Prize in Elementary Particle Physics is awarded to William B. Atwood "For his leading work on the design, construction, and use of the Large Area Telescope on the Fermi Gamma-Ray Satellite, enabling numerous new results in gamma-ray astrophysics and fundamental physics."
The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is the principal scientific instrument on the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope spacecraft. Originally called the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), the mission was renamed for the physicist Enrico Fermi. The Fermi spacecraft was launched into a near-earth orbit on 11 June 2008. The design life of the mission is 5 years and the goal for mission operations is 10 years. The Fermi LAT instrument collaboration is an international effort, funded by agencies in several countries[*].
The LAT is an imaging high-energy gamma-ray telescope covering the energy range from about 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV. Such gamma rays are emitted only in the most extreme conditions, by particles moving very nearly at the speed of light. The LAT's field of view covers about 20% of the sky at any time, and it scans continuously, covering the whole sky every three hours.
Currently the LAT scientific collaboration includes more than 400 scientists and students at more than 90 universities and laboratories in 12 countries. The collaboration has published papers on pulsars, active galactic nuclei, globular clusters, cosmic-ray electrons, gamma-ray bursts, binary stars, supernova remnants, diffuse gamma-ray sources and other subjects.
Data from the LAT are available to the public, along with standard analysis software, from NASA's Fermi Science Support Center.
For general questions about Fermi, Fermi science, or Fermi classroom materials, please contact Fermi Answers
Latest results
External links
- The Fermi Sky Blog
- Full technical description of the LAT
- Upcoming scientific conferences with topics relevant to the LAT
- Fermi has its own music: a prelude and a symphony.
- Gamma Ray Bursts trasformed into visual music (written up by livescience): video
- The other instrument on the Fermi spacecraft is the Fermi Gamma Burst Monitor (GBM).
- Wikipedia
| Country | Funding Agencies |
|---|---|
| United States | NASA; Department of Energy |
| France | Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique; CNRS/Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules |
| Italy | Agenzia Spaziale Italiana; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare; Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica |
| Japan | Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK); Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency |
| Sweden | K. A. Wallenberg Foundation; Swedish Research Council; National Space Board |
