The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, arrived safely at NASA's Kennedy Space Center today, and is being prepped for launch. It'll head into Earth orbit on a Delta-II rocket, and the launch is set for May 16th at 11:45 a.m. Eastern time.
I'm excited about this; I worked on GLAST education for six years, and I know what this machine can do. The images it provides of gamma-ray sources in the sky won't look like Hubble pictures, but they very well may revolutionize how we understand the high-energy Universe. Black holes and gamma-ray bursts are its primary targets, but it will also detect pulsars, the Sun (solar flares can generate gamma rays) and maybe, just maybe, dark matter -- there are some weird ideas that dark matter particles generate gamma rays when they annihilate each other. That's really speculative, but GLAST will help put some numbers to the ...
