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This hardy spacecraft may have burned up in the Earths atmosphere

Comptons Legacy
Highlights from the Gamma Ray Observatory
he highly productive and long-lived Compton
Gamma Ray Observatory mission which documented
a previously little-known world of gamma-ray bursts, unusual
pulsars, and black-hole-fueled particle jets has come to an
end with the failure of one of the satellites three gyroscopes.
On March 24th NASA announced the decision to direct the
satellite back to Earth. If all goes according to plan, Compton
will glide into Earths atmosphere during the first days of
June, less than a month after this issue of Sky & Telescope goes
to press. At 17 tons, Compton is too large to burn up entirely
on reentry. Therefore it must be politely guided toward the

isolated waters of the Pacific Ocean.


But what a trip its been! Launched in 1991, Compton was the
second of NASAs four planned Great Observatories, establishing
new heights for the gamma-ray realm. What the Hubble Space
Telescope (the first Great Observatory) and the Chandra X-ray
Observatory (the third) are doing for optical and X-ray astronomy, Compton has done for gamma-ray astronomy. (The Space
InfraRed Telescope Facility, or SIRTF, Part Four in the Great Observatory story, wont be launched until 2001.) Compton provided NASA with an unprecedented chunk of the electromagnetic
pie, covering a broader range in energy than any other observa-

by Peter J. T. Leonard and Christopher Wanjek

NASA

Launched on April 5, 1991, and deployed two


days later from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) has
enabled astronomers to scrutinize the highenergy sky for nearly a decade. The second of
NASAs Great Observatories, the spacecraft was
named after Arthur Holly Compton (18921962),
who explained how high-energy photons are
scattered by electrons. NASA photograph.

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July 2000 Sky & Telescope

2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

by now, but its discoveries still reverberate among astrophysicists.

Instrument:
Energy range (MeV):
Pointing accuracy:
Field of view:
Mass (kg):

OSSE

COMPTEL

0.10 10
10
small

1.0 30
8.5
large

1,810

1,460

EGRET

Truth be told, Compton still had some juice left. All of its
instruments functioned more or less perfectly. NASAs decision
to deorbit was based mainly on the 1-in-1,000 chance of someone being injured should the spacecraft come down in a completely uncontrolled manner. Plan A called for a deorbit while
there are still two working gyroscopes, for two were deemed
necessary to steer the massive satellite safely. Deorbiting with
one gyro, should the other fail, would be a bit riskier.
NASA space-flight engineers, an ever-resourceful and audacious breed, said they could safely steer the spacecraft back to
Earth without any gyros. This group spent several months perfecting Plan B while some Compton scientists argued that the
satellite could be useful for observing the now-ongoing solaractivity maximum. In the end, NASA didnt want to chance it.
A tough loss, yes. But the Compton team realizes that its
satellite was wildly successful, a workhorse that lived many years
longer than expected. Reflecting on the mission, the team
boasts that Compton brought our understanding of gamma-ray
bursts, quasars, and pulsars to new levels. Here we summarize
but a few of the many hits from Comptons stellar career.

BATSE

20 30,000 0.03 1.9


5 10
1
large
large
1,815

976

Imaging Compton
Telescope
Energetic Gamma
(COMPTEL)
Ray Experiment
Telescope (EGRET)
Oriented Scintillation
Spectrometer
Experiment (OSSE)
Low-gain
antenna

Burst and Transient


Source Experiment
(BATSE; one of eight)
Solar-cell
array

Comptons four scientific instruments were designed for gamma rays


of different energies and optimized for different kinds of studies:
light curves of transient phenomena like gamma-ray bursts (BATSE);
detailed spectra of sources as diverse as the Sun and active galactic
nuclei (OSSE); and all-sky maps at moderately high (COMPTEL) and
extremely high (EGRET) gamma-ray energies. Sky & Telescope diagram based on NASA material.

S&T / STEVEN SIMPSON

tory six orders of magnitude, nearly a million times wider


than the visible portion of the spectrum.
Compton managed this feat with four main instruments
(BATSE, OSSE, COMPTEL, and EGRET), each handling a different patch of the gamma-ray spectrum. Compton needed
four instruments because the gamma-ray electromagnetic
band is so broad. Also, gamma rays of different energies interact with matter in different ways, so different types of technology must be employed to collect them.
Compton needed to be in orbit because the Earths atmosphere, which wonderfully protects our body tissue from harmful
gamma-ray radiation, makes the gamma-ray light show impossible to see. Ground-based gamma-ray observatories can observe
only the very most energetic cosmic gamma rays (those with energies measured in trillions of electron volts), and indirectly at
that, via cascades of secondary particles created when those singular photons slam into the Earths atmosphere (S&T: September 1995, page 20). Although imperative for certain types of science, ground-based observatories cannot witness anywhere near
the range of gamma-ray activity that a satellite can.

MERGING NEUTRON STARS (ARTISTS CONCEPTION) / DON DIXON

High-gain
antenna

Comptons greatest achievement, in many peoples minds,


was its work on gamma-ray
bursts (GRBs). Although these
bursts were discovered in 1967, Compton was
the first satellite that truly enabled an in-depth
study of the phenomenon.
GRBs are the most energetic events known
in the universe, second only to the Big Bang in
power. During a GRBs flash as short as a
few milliseconds or as long as a minute or
more the burst can outshine the rest of the
gamma-ray universe. Then it disappears forever. The nature of the bursting objects remains unknown.
The 300-odd GRBs known prior to Compton were thought
to be associated with neutron stars within the plane of the Milky
Way. Comptons BATSE instrument, many assumed, would simply confirm this scenario, and GRBs would be relegated to an insignificant place in high-energy astrophysics research.
Instead, BATSE showed the GRB distribution to be isotropic
(favoring no direction over another) and spatially limited (that
is, the distribution has an outer edge). This rules out the galacticplane hypothesis and favors the notion that GRBs originate at
cosmological distances, vastly beyond our galaxy.

Gamma-Ray
Bursts

How gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) may come


about. Two city-size, Sun-and-a-half-mass
neutron stars spiral together at an everincreasing pace (left panel), eventually merging (center panel) and forming a black hole
with jets fueled by a transient accretion disk
(right panel). Billions of years later, the explosion briefly manifests itself as a burst of
gamma rays in our sky.

50 km

2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope July 2000

49

Compton showed that gamma-ray bursts originate

North Galactic pole

3C 279

Two-thirds of the way through Comptons career, the ItalianDutch BeppoSAX satellite discovered that many GRBs give off
X-rays hours after the gamma-ray flash. Furthermore, BeppoSAX has been able to determine the positions of these X-ray
afterglows with a precision of a few arcminutes roughly 50
times more precise than BATSE. Follow-up observations at visual and radio wavelengths have nailed down the cosmological
interpretation: redshifts for GRB counterparts range from
roughly 0.4 to 4.0, implying distances measured in billions of
light-years (S&T: February 1998, page 32). Thats way out there.
While BATSE provides only crude coordinates for GRBs, it
relays them to the astronomical community in near-real time.
The idea is that someone, somewhere will record the burst
with something before it fades from view. On January 23,
1999, BATSE helped a robotic camera catch the first visiblelight GRB counterpart seen to flare at the same time as the
gamma-ray flash. The burst briefly reached 9th magnitude
and would have been visible with good binoculars (S&T: May
1999, page 54).
BATSE may be in ashes, but there is gold in its treasure
chest of data. Characteristics of the bursts light curves may
enable astronomers to determine GRB distances, allowing the
bursts to be used as cosmological probes even when no visible-light counterpart is seen. This and other archival uses of
Comptons data may someday help astronomers figure out the
ultimate cause of GRBs.
Quasars are the extraordinarily
bright cores of very distant galaxies,
and they often are visible at radio and X-ray
energies as well as in ordinary light. This emission is likely produced by a supermassive black
hole accreting copious amounts of interstellar
gas (S&T: May 1999, page 40). Along with
gamma-ray bursts, quasars are among the most
distant objects known to science.
When Compton was launched, quasars were
not well understood. The only quasar seen in
gamma rays before Compton was 3C 273, detected in 1976 by the European Space Agencys
COS-B satellite. When Comptons EGRET in-

10

Gamma rays

1010

1012

July 2000 Sky & Telescope

QUASAR NUCLEUS (ARTISTS CONCEPTION) / DON DIXON

1014

1016

1018

10 20

10 22

10 24

Frequency (Hertz)

When combined with observations spanning the electromagnetic


spectrum, gamma-ray data have made it clear that these highestenergy photons constitute most of the quasar 3C 279s radiant energy, especially during flares. Inset: This false-color image shows how
very energetic gamma rays (those above 100 million electron volts)
from 3C 279 and 3C 273 (both in Virgo) appeared to Comptons
EGRET instrument in February 1996. The crosses represent the quasars
optical positions. Courtesy the EGRET team and NASA.
Frequency (Hertz)
3 10 6

3 1010

100

3 1014

Infrared
Microwave

Radio

10 2

10 4

10 6

3 1018

Ultraviolet X-rays

10 8

3 10 22

Gamma rays

10 10

10 12

10 14

Wavelength (meters)

Radio waves, visible light, and gamma rays are all composed of
photons particles of electromagnetic radiation that differ only
in wavelength. Gamma rays cannot penetrate Earths atmosphere, so
astronomical sources of them must be studied from orbit. Adapted
from Discovering the Cosmos by R. C. Bless.

Accretion disk
(cross-section)

Blazars

50

3C 279

100

Black hole

Shock
front

Jet

Ultraviolet
X-ray

Gamma-ray

Optical
Infrared
X-ray

Optical
Infrared
X-ray

Gamma-ray Radio

Radiation type

According to one model, a blazars gamma rays emerge chiefly from


a shock front within the objects Earthward-pointing jet. Adapted
from a diagram by Alan Marscher (Boston University).

2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

S&T / STEVEN SIMPSON

The positions of 2,408 gamma-ray bursts detected with BATSE suggest that the bursts took place billions of light-years away and are
more luminous than supernovae. Courtesy the BATSE team.

3C 273

1991
1992 (Low state)
1996 (Pre-flare)
1996 (Flare)

Visible

South Galactic pole

Intensity (arbitrary units)

1,000

at cosmological distances, vastly beyond our galaxy.

200

100

100
800

1,200

1,400

1,600

1,800

Energy (thousands of electron volts)

Some 10,000 light-years away, Cassiopeia A


is the expanding remnant of a supernova
explosion that Earthbound astronomers
could have seen around 1680 if they had
had X-ray or radio telescopes at their disposal. These false-color X-ray (top left) and
radio (bottom left) views, from the Chandra
X-ray Observatory and the Very Large
Array, respectively, detail the interaction of
the dead stars castoffs with surrounding
matter. Comptons gamma-ray spectrum of
Cas A (above) measured the amount of titanium-44, a short-lived radioactive product of supernova explosions.

Supernovae reveal themselves to Compton in a unique


way through gamma rays
created by the radioactive decay of trace elements in their fiery ejecta.
A supernova occurs after a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel, allowing the core of the
star to collapse suddenly, then explode. The exploding stars outer layers are thrown off into
the interstellar medium and the mix is visible
Below: This false-color all-sky map from the COMPTEL instrument
as a supernova remnant (SNR). For a few days
shows the brightness of gamma rays from aluminum-26 nuclei. With
to a couple of weeks, a single supernova can
a half-life of 700,000 years, these long-lived nuclei trace the galaxys
outshine its host galaxy.
star-formation history over the last several million years. The grid
On February 24, 1987, Supernova 1987A
represents galactic coordinates, with the North Galactic Pole on top.
went off in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The Solar MaxCourtesy the COMPTEL collaboration and NASA.
imum Mission saw the radioactive decay of cobalt-56 (56Co) six
months later. This was the first direct confirmation of the widely held belief that heavy chemical elements are forged by supernovae. Shortly after Comptons launch in 1991, the OSSE
instrument detected gamma rays from SN 1987A
spawned cobalt-57 (57Co), which has a half-life of
272 days. The data were used to determine that
the abundance ratio of iron isotopes (56Fe/57Fe)
in the LMC was 1.5 times that of our Sun, arguing against a much more substantial ratio,
Vela
Carina
which had been reported previously on the
Cygnus region
Inner galaxy
region
basis of a less-reliable analysis.
Anticenter region
Gamma rays from the decay of titanium-44
and Taurus clouds
44
26
( Ti) and aluminum-26 ( Al), both present in supernova remnants, are food for COMPTEL. Titanium44 has a half-life of around 60 years; aluminum-26s is
700,000 years. As such, these isotopes serve as tracers for new

Supernova
Remnants

SUPERNOVA 1987A / HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM

1,000

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Sky & Telescope July 2000

51

COMPTEL COLLABORATION

Number of detected photons

strument stared at 3C 273 in 1991, it found another quasar in


the same field of view. This other quasar, named 3C 279, was
many times brighter than 3C 273 to EGRETs eyes. It just so
happened that 3C 279 was undergoing a flare that made it one
of the brightest sources of high-energy gamma rays in the entire
sky at the time, despite its distance of 4 billion light-years.
Quasars visible at gamma-ray energies are now called blazars,
and EGRET established them as a class of astronomical objects.
The Third EGRET Catalog contains 66 high-confidence blazars
and 27 lower-confidence ones. Blazars represent the largest welldefined class of nontransient gamma-ray sources.
As with quasars, each blazar likely harbors a central supermassive black hole with a pair of relativistic jets emanating in
opposite directions. The bright, highly variable emission characteristic of blazars can be seen when the observer looks almost
along one of the jets that is, down the barrel of the gun.
Many of the unidentified gamma-ray sources EGRET
found at high galactic latitudes may be blazars. A multitude of
blazars also may account for a diffuse, isotropic, high-energy,
gamma-ray background first observed by NASAs SAS-2
(Small Astronomy Satellite 2) in the 1970s and subsequently
confirmed by EGRET at photon energies of 30 million electron volts or more.

Comptons revelations will radically alter

li n

es
S&T / STEVEN SIMPSON

A spinning neutron star with a tilted magnetic field can generate


two opposing beams of particles and electromagnetic radiation; if
at least one of the latter can be seen from Earth, astronomers detect
the spinning star as a pulsar. Adapted from a diagram by Joshua
Winn (MIT).

Number of detected photons

CRAB NEBULA AND PULSAR IN TAURUS / NOAO

el

fi

July 2000 Sky & Telescope

tic

52

Spin
axis

Pulsar wind
(particles)

ne

Neutron Stars

Comptons legacy in the


world of pulsars was the
revelation that some may be pulsing primarily
(if not only) in gamma rays, and not at the
telltale radio wavelengths preferred by most
pulsars. This revelation will radically alter
todays pulsar census as tomorrows high-resolution gamma-ray instruments find more of
these gamma-ray pulsars.
A pulsar is a rotating neutron star with a
strong dipolar magnetic field. Created during a
supernova explosion, a neutron star packs a
mass slightly greater than the Suns into a sphere
with a 10-kilometer radius. As it spins, the neutron star produces a beam of radiation from charged particles
trapped in its intense magnetic field. An observer fixed in space
sees pulses of this radiation as the beam periodically sweeps
through his or her line of sight, hence the name pulsar.
Since their discovery in 1967, pulsars have been largely the
domain of radio astronomers. There are hundreds now identified in our galaxy. Before Compton, only two the Crab and
Vela pulsars were known to emit gamma rays, and they did
so in conjunction with their radio pulses. Compton found five
more gamma-ray-emitting pulsars. These objects tend to be
young and rapidly rotating. The Crab pulsar, for example, rotates 30 times per second. Pulsars rotating at these speeds
seem to efficiently accelerate particles to very high energies.
A mysterious object called Geminga (for Gemini gammaray source) has turned out to be a pulsar. Initially Geminga
could be seen only at gamma-ray wavelengths, and in an Italian
dialect the word has a second meaning: It is not there. Eventu-

Radiation beam
(radio, visible light,
and/or X-rays)

M ag

supernovae and old ones, respectively. A prime example of a


very young supernova is SNR GRO J0852-4642 near the Vela
SNR. This remnant, approximately 680 years old and 650 lightyears away, was discovered independently by COMPTEL and
the X-ray-sensitive Rosat satellite. The extremely bright Vela
SNR dominates the region and kept the younger, closer SNR
hidden until recently. Why this supernova wasnt seen (or at
least recorded) by astronomers 680 years ago is a mystery in its
own right (S&T: April 1999, page 22).
COMPTEL also detected 44Ti emission from the Cassiopeia
A supernova remnant, enabling estimates of the isotopes
yield. Cassiopeia A is likely about 300 years old, but the supernova that spawned this remnant also wasnt recorded by astronomers (if indeed it ever was visible to the eye).
In 1979, the HEAO (High Energy Astronomy Observatory) 3
spacecraft was the first to see gamma-ray emission due to
nucleosynthesis: the radioactive decay of small quantities of
26
Al produced by massive stars and expelled into the interstellar medium. Aluminum-26 emission traces the galaxys recent
star-formation history. COMPTEL mapped this emission with
unprecedented angular resolution and found that it is indeed
concentrated in regions of star formation. The data have been
used to calculate that there are roughly 1 to 2 solar masses of
26
Al in the galaxy.

300
250
200

Geminga Pulse Profile


EGRET Instrument

150
100
50
0
0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

Geminga

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

Pulsar phase

Crab pulsar

Pulsed gamma rays have been detected by Compton from seven pulsars. But Geminga, on the Gemini-Orion border, stands out because
for years its pulses were seen only by X-ray and gamma-ray satellites.
(Other gamma-ray pulsars, like the Crab, generally were discovered
and first characterized with radio telescopes.) Courtesy the EGRET
team and NASA.

ally X-ray pulses were seen from this region, and EGRET found
a pulse period identical to that seen in X-rays, confirming that
Geminga is indeed a pulsar. Geminga has only recently been detected at radio wavelengths, where pulsars have been traditionally discovered (and some astronomers find the radio data unconvincing). Several of the 170 unidentified EGRET sources
may turn out to be Geminga-like pulsars.
Soft Gamma Repeaters (SGRs) are another class of neutron
stars that Compton has scrutinized profitably. SGRs sporadically emit short bursts of soft gamma rays, those with energies
below 10,000 electron volts. Before Compton, many thought
SGRs had something to do with neutron stars that have very

2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

censuses of pulsars based only on radio surveys.

Solar flares are explosions


of energetic particles and electromagnetic radiation in the outer atmosphere
of the Sun. Lessons learned from solar explosions apply to much larger explosions that
we see elsewhere in the universe. Closer to
home, these solar particles can cause communications and electrical problems on Earth
(March issue, page 50).
Compton was launched just after the last
peak in solar activity, or solar maximum, but
fortunately the Sun was still active and Compton got itself a tan with several large flares in
June 1991. In this regard, Compton was following in the footsteps of OSO (Orbiting Solar Observatory)
7 (197174) and the Solar Maximum Mission (198081 and
198489), the only other space missions to see gamma-ray
emission lines from solar flares.
Comptons spectrometer, OSSE, detected several nuclear
emission lines from a solar flare on June 4, 1991, including
those of iron, magnesium, neon, silicon, carbon, oxygen, and
nitrogen. These give information about the abundances of elements in the ambient coronal gas. EGRET detected a highenergy afterglow from a solar flare on June 11, 1991. No spectral cutoff was detected, so presumably the flare produced photons with even higher energies than those picked up by EGRET.
For its part, COMPTEL detected neutrons from a solar flare
on June 15, 1991. (The instrument is able to discern when
neutrons, rather than gamma rays, have collided with its innards.) This resulted in the first particle image of any astrophysical object. The Sun may be the only object that will ever
be imaged this way, since neutrons decay with a half-life of
only five minutes when they are not bound up within atomic

Gamma-ray detection rate (relative units)

June 9, 1991
June 11, 1991
June 15, 1991

10

Time after flare onset (hours)

The evolution of three solar flares that took place just after the last
solar-activity maximum. Each curve is derived from gamma rays at an
energy of 2.223 million electron volts; such a photon is emitted from
a helium nucleus that has absorbed an extra neutron. Inset: While
coarse, this false-color COMPTEL image shows neutrons, not gamma
rays, from the June 15th flare, making a unique particle picture of
the Sun. Courtesy the COMPTEL collaboration.

Solar Flares

nuclei. COMPTEL also detected a gamma-ray afterglow from


the same flare. In this case, the particles were likely accelerated
not just during the impulsive phase at the beginning of the
flare but over an extended period of time.
Many questions about solar flares remain unanswered. Too
bad Compton will not be around to observe them during this
solar maximum.

The Future

GLAST SPACECRAFT (ARTISTS IMPRESSION) / HYTEC INC.

ULTRAVIOLET IMAGE OF THE SUN / NASA, EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

strong magnetic fields, and perhaps even with GRBs. Compton


helped demonstrate that the former belief was true (in spades)
and that the latter belief was completely false.
The three SGRs known before Compton were all discovered
in 1979. The March 5, 1979, outburst of SGR 0526-66 in the
Large Magellanic Cloud released more energy in gamma rays
in one-tenth of a second than the Sun has released at all wavelengths over the past 1,000 years. A powerful outburst from
SGR 1900+14 briefly disrupted communications on and near
Earth on August 27, 1998, even though the object lies roughly
20,000 light-years distant (S&T: January 1999, page 22).
BATSE discovered a fourth SGR in June 1998, now called
SGR 1627-41. Observations from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite and the so-called InterPlanetary Network (IPN) of spacecraft helped link this SGR to a supernova
remnant called G337.0-0.1 for its galactic coordinates in the
constellation Ara. Many now agree that SGR outbursts are due
to starquakes on magnetars, neutron stars born with extremely strong magnetic fields (1014 gauss). SGRs also appear
to be related to anomalous X-ray pulsars, or AXPs. But SGRs
have nothing to do with GRBs, which are vastly more powerful events that take place in distant galaxies.

It is hoped that several upcoming


missions will continue where the
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory left off. Each
zooms in on a particular swath of gamma-ray
bandwidth that Compton had covered.
NASAs HETE (High-Energy Transient Explorer) 2 is a small Explorer-class mission that
will localize gamma-ray bursts more precisely
than BATSE and BeppoSAX and relay that information to the ground very quickly. Now
scheduled for a July or August launch, HETE-2
will also monitor X-ray and gamma-ray flares
from a variety of astrophysical sources.
HESSI, the High Energy Solar Spectroscopic
Imager, will observe solar-flare gamma rays with better energy
resolution than Compton could provide. With a launch once
scheduled for July 2000, HESSI would have been perfect for
studying the present solar maximum. However, the spacecraft
suffered serious damage during vibration tests in March. The
mission has been postponed for at least six months,
making it all the more frustrating that Compton wont be
in orbit anymore.
The European Space Agencys International Gamma-Ray As-

2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope July 2000

53

Future missions will follow where Compton has led.


scheduled for a 2005 launch, is a collaboration among NASA,
the U.S. Department of Energy, and international partners.
GLAST will continuously probe the high-energy gamma-ray
sky with 50 to 100 times the sensitivity of EGRET. GLASTs
ability to study relativistic particle jets from black holes makes
the mission particularly alluring to both astronomers and particle physicists.

NASA

SETH DIGEL (GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER)

Ending in a
Blaze of Glory

The gamma-ray sky, as seen today by Comptons EGRET instrument


(top) and as might be seen one day by the proposed Gamma-ray
Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST (bottom). Both false-color images are oriented with the plane of the Milky Way running horizontally through the center. The GLAST image is only a simulation, intended to illustrate how expected gains in sensitivity and resolution
might reveal myriad new sources of energetic gamma rays.

trophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) will be launched in 2001.


INTEGRAL will concentrate on the high-energy X-ray and
low- and medium-energy gamma-ray bands, essentially replacing OSSE and COMPTEL. And NASAs Swift mission,
scheduled for 2003, will search for gamma-ray bursts and
other explosive phenomena, filling BATSEs shoes. The name
Swift reflects this spacecrafts ability to rapidly locate bursts,
relay this information to Earth, and follow up with its own ultraviolet and X-ray observations.
Finally, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST),

Comptons undeniable
legacy is in the numbers.
The mission observed approximately 400 gammaray sources (not including GRBs); before
Compton, only about 40 were known. BATSE
detected more than 2,600 GRBs; before Compton, only about 300 had been logged. Scientific
journals publish roughly 180 Compton-specific
articles per year, about one every other day.
The Compton era will have ended as it began,
in suspense. The nail biting began back in April
1991, a few hours after Comptons release from
the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Comptons high-gain
antenna would not erect itself properly, and its loss would have
crippled the mission. Astronauts Jerry Ross and Jay Apt performed an unscheduled space walk to physically shake it loose.
The nail biting resumed last December with the news that
one of Comptons gyros had failed. Months of debate over
Comptons fate culminated with the decision to bring er on
home. If the players follow the script, during the first week of
June the mighty observatory will burn to silvery dust high
over the Pacific, south of Hawaii, where it may well be visible
to skywatchers along the path. A few stubborn chunks will
sink quietly to the bottom of the ocean.
No Compton spacecraft will adorn the halls of the Smithsonian Institutions National Air and Space Museum. But the
Compton legacy will remain on permanent exhibit in those
minds graced with fantastic visions of gamma-ray bursts,
black-hole jets, and all the other things that go boom no,
make that KABOOM in the night.
Peter Leonard and Christopher Wanjek work for Raytheon Information Technology and Scientific Services in support of NASA
space-science missions.

Just as the 17-ton Compton Gamma Ray Observatory loomed large in the bay of the Space Shuttle
Atlantis, its legacy will loom large in the annals of
high-energy astrophysics. NASA photograph.

54

July 2000 Sky & Telescope

2000 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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