Jan 21 2005
From The Space Library
NASA announced that the NASA-led Swift mission had detected and captured its first image of a GRB. On 17 January, the craft had turned, autonomously, to focus on the burst~ quickly enough to capture an image with its X-ray Telescope (XRT), while its Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) continued to detect gamma rays. The event marked the first time that an x-ray telescope had imaged an in-process GRB. Previous images had captured the burst's afterglow, but never the burst itself. The event had also marked the first time that BAT had detected a burst, and an XRT detection had autonomously followed it. Swift had carried a third instrument, the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT), which was still in its testing phase. UVOT had not been collecting data when the other two telescopes detected the burst. John A. Nousek, Swift's Mission Operations Director at Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania, remarked that Swift had successfully achieved, early in its mission, its primary purpose~ to detect the fleeting bursts and to focus telescopes on them autonomously within a minute. (NASA, “Swift Mission Images the Birth of a Black Hole,” news release 05-019, 21 January 2005, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/jan/HQ_05019_swift_blackhole.html (accessed 11 May 2009).)
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