**[Transcript of GLAST First Light and Renaming Telecon
8/26/08]{.underline}**

Carol:

Good afternoon and thank you for all parties for standing by. Your lines
will be on a listen only until the question and answer session of
today's call. The conference is being recorded, if you have any
objections you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn
today's conference over to Mr. J.D Harrington, thank you sir, you may
begin.

J.D. Harrington:

Thanks Carol, good afternoon I'm J.D Harrington, public affairs officer
of NASA's Science Mission directorate I would like to welcome you today
to today's media teleconference where we will discuss the first results
from NASA's Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope. Later on we will
announce the observatory's new name. Before we get started however, I
need to take care of a few house keeping duties. First, we have a
website available where you can find the panelists' bios as well as the
briefing materials the panelists will use during their discussion. You
can open the link and follow along. The web address is
[www.nasa.gov/glast](http://www.nasa.gov/glast) G-L-A-S-T. I'll give
that address once again in just a moment. This is a media telecon, we
have five panelists with us today, each will give a short two to five
minute briefing on their specific topics. Next we'll announce the
observatory's new name and how that name came about. We'll then open the
phone lines for questions and answers. This telecon will be limited to
one hour, it is also being recorded. Media representatives can dial in
anytime in the next seven days to listen to the telecon again. I'll
provide the specific dial-in information at the end of the telecon.
Because we have a large number of people joining us today, reporters
will be limited to one question with one follow up. Once everyone has
had a chance to ask a question and if time permits, we will start
another round, starting at the top of the list. As the operator said,
phone lines will be muted, if you want to ask a question you must press
the star 1 key to signal us that you have a question. We will then call
on you in turn. Finally, the dial in numbers are for media's use in
asking questions. If you are not a media representative please hang up.
You can listen to the telecon online at
[www.nasa.gov/newsaudio](http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio). And again as
promised, here is the web link for the telecon's briefing materials to
help you follow along. [www.nasa.gov/glast](http://www.nasa.gov/glast).
Today's panelists include Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics
Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. Dennis Kovar, the
Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics at the US
Department of Energy in Germantown, Maryland. We have Steve Ritz, the
GLAST project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center at
Greenbelt, Maryland. Peter Michelson, Large Area Telescope Principal
Investigator at Stanford University, Palo Alto California. Chip Meegan
is also online, he is the GLAST Burst Monitor Principal Investigator at
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville Alabama. And just for
info, we also have online a distinguished panel of experts on GLAST
instruments, people that will be called upon if necessary to answer
specific questions. And with that I would like to hand the mic over to
Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics Division director, Jon.

Jon Morse:

Thanks J.D. Good afternoon and welcome to today's event designed to
highlight NASA's Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope, otherwise known
as GLAST. Later on we will announce its new name. First however I'd like
to talk about the team that's helped bring GLAST to life. As you know,
GLAST is a powerful space observatory and will explore the most extreme
environments in the universe where nature harnesses energies far beyond
anything possible on Earth. I call it our "extreme machine." It will
search for new signs of laws of physics and what composes the mysterious
dark matter. GLAST will explain how black holes accelerate immense jets
of material to nearly the speed of light, and it will help crack the
mysteries of the enormously powerful explosions known as gamma-ray
bursts. Finally, GLAST will answer some of the long standing questions
the scientific community has had about solar flares, pulsars, and the
origin of cosmic rays. Since GLAST launched on June 11^th^, the project
team has been busy turning on the spacecraft's various subsystems and
calibrating its onboard instruments. Though this team is distributed
around the globe, it has already proven itself highly productive in
meeting the projects many objectives. GLAST was developed in
collaboration with the US Department of Energy and our international
partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden. NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland has overall responsibility
for the project, while NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Alabama is responsible for one of the two instruments
onboard. General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems was responsible
for building and integrating the space craft. GLAST's primary
instrument, the Large Area Space Telescope was spearheaded by principal
investigator Professor Peter Michelson and his institution Stanford
University and the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center. They didn't do this by themselves though. Michelson forged an
international collaboration encompassing over one-hundred scientists
from several other countries in addition to those I just mentioned. The
second instrument, the GLAST Burst Monitor whose principal investigator
is Dr. Charles Meegan of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, was
provided through a collaboration between NASA Marshall, the University
of Alabama, in Huntsville, and colleagues in Germany. I'm extremely
pleased with the progress GLAST has made in commencing its science
operation and the pace of new discoveries will be very exciting in the
days and years ahead. And with that I'd like to hand the mic off to my
friend and colleague from the Department of Energy Dr. Dennis Kovar,
associate director of science for high energy physics US department of
energy. Dennis.

Dennis Kovar:

Thank you, I believe Jon has done a very good job in describing GLAST,
its science, and where we are today. The Office of High Energy Physics
and Department of Energy's Office of Science is very pleased with how
successfully DOE and NASA collaborated in implementing the GLAST mission
and how smoothly the GLAST check out and data taking after launch
proceeded. DOE's focus has been on the Large Area Telescope which is
basically a particle physics detector in space. The scientific
communities of particle physicists and astrophysicists from research
laboratories and universities each brought their area of expertise to
the mission to produce the telescope. GLAST opens a new window on the
gamma-ray sky that has the potential for significant new discoveries. A
particular interest to particle physics is a search for dark matter in
the form of weakly interacting massive particles and exploring very high
energy acceleration mechanisms in the universe. However, GLAST will
provide new information on a broad range of astrophysics phenomena as
Jon outlined previously, and hence make important and unique
contributions to both of our fields. Again, we are very pleased at what
the cooperation between DOE and NASA has accomplished and with the
successful launch and start of data taking on GLAST, we are looking
forward to future partnerships with NASA in areas of joint scientific
interest. And with that, I'd like to hand off to Dr. Steve Ritz, the
GLAST project scientist. Steve.

Steve Ritz:

Thanks very much Dennis and hello everyone, if you could all please open
up my slides and jump to slide two. Scientists worldwide are very
excited about the breakthrough capabilities that we now have at the
extreme high energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum. As you've
heard, in addition to answering key questions about a broad variety of
known astrophysical systems from across the universe, GLAST has great
discovery potential. We're expecting surprises. The observatory is
working very well and after our initial checkout period we've already
started the first year of science operations. If you can go to the next
slide please. Here you see a picture of the observatory in the fairing,
atop the rocket shortly before launch on June 11^th^. The observatory
consists of the two instruments already mentioned, plus the spacecraft.
A key point for today is the huge field of view of both instruments. In
our standard operating mode the entire sky is viewed every two orbits or
about three hours. This is especially important because the gamma-ray
sky is constantly changing - a characteristic that is remarkably
different from the impression we get when looking at the night sky with
our own eyes and as you are about to see in the next presentation. With
that, I now pass the phone to Professor Peter Michelson, the LAT
Principal Investigator who will show the main results for today. Peter.

Peter Michelson:

Thanks Steve. Well first let me say I'm very happy to be here and reveal
to you the first images from the large area telescope, and I do this on
behalf of a large international team and also the GLAST mission team
here in the states. As J.D. mentioned at the beginning, several team
members of the LAT team are available for questions after all the
presentations of the panel are finished. In particular I'd just want to
highlight the contribution of one member of that team who's online: Bill
Atwood of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Bill has been a
collaborator ever since he was at the Department of Energy's SLAC
laboratory, where he was when he came up with the conceptual design of
the LAT instrument more than 16 years ago, and that's what we're flying
today on GLAST. So with that, let me turn to the first light image of
the gamma-ray sky that we've obtained with the Large Area Telescope. If
you look at my presentation online, turn to slide number two. So the
image you see here is a projection of the full sky onto a sphere, a
so-called orthographic projection. A rotating version of this that
reveals the entire sky is available on the website if you want to
download it. If you download it, the full animation, it shows the entire
gamma-ray sky with the northern galactic pole visible, and then as it
continues to rotate, it switches to highlight the southern galactic
pole. The static image you see on the slide only shows the northern
galactic pole as well as part of the plane of our galaxy which is the
bright band across the image. Let me emphasize, this image is the
cumulative exposure obtained after just 95 hours of observing with
GLAST. GLAST was in its scanning sky survey mode when this was done, and
this was obtained during the instruments initialization and check out
phase. Indeed the GLAST LAT images the sky every 3 hours as Steve
pointed out, and this is providing us with an unprecedented high energy
imaging all sky monitor of the entire sky from 20 million electron volts
to more than 300 billion electron volts. With just the 4 days of data
you see here, the LAT has confirmed many of the discoveries of EGRET in
the 1990s and more recently those of AGILE. If you turn now to the next
slide you'll see the same all sky image projected onto a flat map of the
sky, so this is slide number, uh, number 3. In this image you see the
center of the Milky Way galaxy in fact at the center of the image. Again
we see a bright band of diffuse emission from the Milky Way across the
center of the map. This radiation is due mostly to gamma-rays generated
by the collision of high energy cosmic rays with interstellar gas and
radiation that's present in the disk of our own galaxy. Some of it may
come from the annihilation of exotic particles that are thought to make
up dark matter. The color scale you see corresponds to the intensity of
the gamma rays with dark blue being the faintest emission and bright
yellow being the most intense emission that you see along the galactic
plane. As the LAT sky exposure builds up with time we are going to see
deeper and deeper into our universe and will be able to study the low
intensity diffuse emission with unprecedented detail and this may reveal
the gamma-ray signatures of particle dark matter. As both Dennis and Jon
mentioned earlier the search for dark matter is one of GLAST's major
scientific objectives. So already with just 4 days of data we have seen
many sources previously discovered by EGRET and a number of new sources
as well. If you'll turn to slide number 4, you'll see some of these
sources labeled. Let me start with the Vela pulsar which is a rotating
neutron star that is the brightest persistent source in the gamma-ray
sky. In the upper part of this slide you see a film strip of 5 images of
the sky region around Vela. An animated version is available for
download on the website. During this first light observation, the LAT in
fact detected all of the gamma-ray pulsars seen by EGRET while it was
operational for about 9 years. We are now poised to detect many more.
The wide field of view and sensitivity of the LAT which Steve mentioned
has also led to the detection of an active galaxy by the name of 3C454.3
that is located about 7 billion light years from earth. We detected it
when it was in an extremely active state. You can see this source
prominently in the lower left quadrant of this image. Now subsequent to
this first light observation, 3C454.3 faded away in gamma-rays to be
succeeded by yet another active galaxy at northern galactic latitudes.
It has the name Parks 1502+106. This source is located almost 10 billion
light years from Earth. In conclusion, the LAT collaboration and the
entire GLAST team are just extraordinarily pleased with the on-orbit
performance of the LAT , and I hope you get a sense of that from the
first light images that we are sharing with you today, and we are really
excited about beginning the first year's sky survey phase of the
mission. We are observing the gamma-ray sky everyday, many times. This
is like the night sky at a 4^th^ of July celebration but we're seeing it
on a cosmic scale, it's really exciting. You can expect to be hearing
new results from GLAST very often in the future and we look forward to
reporting those to you. Finally let me thank again the large
international collaboration and the agencies from around the world that
have supported the LAT instrument development and its operations, that
have made all of this possible. For your reference, the last slide in
the package on the website, is a list of the LAT collaboration
institutions. So with that I hand this off now to Dr. Charles Meegan,
Principle Investigator of the GLAST Burst Monitor.

Charles "Chip" Meegan:

Thank you Peter, and congratulations to you and your team for those
truly impressive results. The mission of the GLAST burst monitor is to
detect gamma-ray bursts, measure their positions in the sky and their
energy spectra. We cover the traditional energy range as was pointed out
before for gamma-ray burst studies about 10keV up to 30MeV which is the
bottom of the LAT energy range. I am pleased to report that we are
carrying out our tasks very well indeed. If you will please open up my
PDF presentation and if you look at the second chart you'll see a map of
the sky similar to the map that Peter just showed, but these are showing
the gamma-ray bursts that we've observed in the first month of
operation. We see a gamma-ray burst about once a day and this is the
highest rate of autonomous onboard burst detection of any satellite
ever. What you see is something very different from Peter's map, the
gamma-ray bursts are arriving from random positions all over the sky,
not in the plane of the Milky Way of our own galaxy - that was well
known before this mission started. The background of that map shows over
2700 bursts that were observed by BATSE on the Gamma-Ray Observatory. So
we are well on our way I think to even beating BATSE's record for total
amount of number of bursts detected. All 14 of our detectors are working
just beautifully, the background rates are about as predicted and fairly
stable and that's important because the background limits our
sensitivity to bursts so our threshold for detecting bursts is very
close to what was predicted before launch. Four of our bursts have also
been detected by NASA's Swift observatory. This is important because it
allows us to check our computed sky positions because Swift can do very
accurate localizations. Our accuracy is typically 2 or 3 degrees which I
think is quite good for a non-imaging instrument. The value of this
capability is that the sensitivity of the LAT for detecting high energy
emissions from GRBs can be improved significantly if GBM can tell where
and when to look. The next chart shows a particularly nice burst that we
detected on July 23^rd^. You see a steady background rate at a couple of
hundred counts per second, and at about time zero is when the gamma-ray
burst was detected on-board - the automatic software noticed an increase
in the count rate, began to transmit high rate data. We are getting
bursts like this every day. This is a particularly nice example that
shows the high time structure, the flickering that is very common in
gamma-ray bursts. So to conclude, GBM is performing very well, our team
is very excited about the wealth of new information that will be pouring
in for many years to come. With that I'll hand it back to J.D.

J.D. Harrington:

Thanks Chip. And now it's time to announce the new name for NASA's Gamma
Ray Large Area Space Telescope. Once again here is Jon Morse.

Jon Morse:

Thanks J.D. It is indeed my great pleasure to announce that GLAST will
be renamed the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. Enrico Fermi, an Italian
physicist who immigrated to the United States in the 30's was the first
to suggest a viable mechanism for astrophysical particle acceleration.
His work is the foundation for our understanding of many types of
sources to be studied by the new satellite that now bears his name.
Fermi is most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear
reactor and for his major contributions to the development of quantum
theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938 for his work on induced
radioactivity and is today regarded as one of the top scientists of the
20^th^ century. This new name was selected after NASA asked for
suggestions from the public and received more than 12,000 entries. In
addition to his direct connection to the science of our new gamma-ray
mission, Fermi holds special significance to the US Department of
Energy, the Italian space agency and the Italian particle physics
agency, three of the major contributors to the mission. And I'll throw
it back to J.D. and I think we are ready to field questions.

J.D. Harrington:

Absolutely, thanks Jon. And with that we will go into the question and
answer session. Two reminders: if you just joined us the briefing
materials can be found on
[www.nasa.gov/glast](http://www.nasa.gov/glast). Also you need to push
the "star one" key on your telephone to let us know you have a question.
We will then call on you in order. Finally, please direct your question
to a specific panelist if possible to eliminate any confusion. And with
that we will pass it to the operator. Carol.

Carol:

Thank you. Once again, that's "star one" for any questions. And our
first question today will come from Seth Borenstein from the Associated
Press, your line is open.

Seth Borenstein:

Yes, thank you - for Steve Ritz; looking at the images you have there
they look an awful lot like EGRET, which I guess is to be expected, but
when I look at this I'm trying to figure you know yes you've confirmed
everything from EGRET, and maybe it's a little to much to ask in those
first few days, but is there? I mean what new have you discovered about
this mysterious gamma-ray world here. I mean universe here that we
didn't know from GLAST and I guess I have a follow up.

Steve Ritz:

Ok, thanks for your question. I think there are two important take away
messages and I'll also hand this over to Peter to comment as the LAT PI.
First of all, we did this map in a very brief period of time, just in a
matter of days, whereas the previous experiment, EGRET, took more than a
year to make an equivalent map. That is an excellent, that holds a
tremendous amount of promise of things to come. I think a very good
example is 3C454.3 and actually the other blazar as well that GLAST saw,
when the LAT turned on, it was just blazing, 3C454.3 was blazing, it was
impossible to miss and it wasn't like that before. One of the key things
that GLAST is going to do for us is that we're going to learn when these
blazars are in their flaring state and be able to alert the entire
world's facilities with smaller fields of view to have a look at these
objects and we expect this to be happening now quite frequently, and
then in addition to that, we're able to monitor the flaring states of
large groups of these objects over time, and that opens up a whole new
field of study to understand how these objects work.

Seth Borenstein:

And did Peter have something else to say about this before my follow up?

Peter Michelson:

Just to assert what Steve said, I was on the EGRET team during that era,
that was a highly successful mission, but one of the frustrations was
every time we discovered an AGN, we typically would discover it after it
flared, and with GLAST we have an all sky alert capability. When one of
these things goes off, we see it coming, we see it peak, we see it go
away and that will provide us tremendous insights into the physics of
what's generating that emission.

Steve Ritz:

I guess maybe what I would say also is we're opening our eyes for the
first time. Imagine you had just had Lasik surgery and you open your
eyes and you see everything that you hadn't really seen before, you had
understood it was there, and suddenly its there and to you it's a thing
of great beauty, and it shows to us that enormous amount of promise in
the future. Again this was just the first smallest taste of data.

Seth Borenstein:

Ok just a follow up on that; about 3C454.3, Once again, In addition to,
now I think you said, it is 4.7 billion light years away? How long did
it blaze for? How strong was it? When did it sort of fade away? And I
guess what does that really mean except that is that the equivalent of
seeing a fireworks go off and saying ooh ah or what does it tell us?

Steve Ritz:

Peter would you like to answer that one?

Peter Michelson:

Yeah I'll go ahead and take a shot at that. It actually was 3C454.3, we
knew it was in an active state at the time we turned the instrument on,
and it was of great interest of us to see it, and we did. So we didn't
actually catch it going into the flaring state, but we certainly saw it
fade away. Now to address why is that interesting; well we don't yet
understand yet the mechanism in detail of how the particles that emit
the gamma-rays, how they're accelerated in the vicinity of a black hole,
and we're not even sure of what the nature of the particles are. It
turns out that various theoretical models suggest scenarios that can be
tested with observations, but one of the critical parts of that is to
obtain multi-wave length spectra before, during, and after the outburst.
And so with the GLAST capability and an armada of scientists addressing
this problem, we're going to make tremendous progress on this in the
next few years.

Steve Ritz:

And maybe to add to that, we've known that these objects shine
incredibly brightly in gamma-rays, remember this is an object very far
away and its power output is absolutely stupendous. What we don't know
is where the gamma-rays are actually emitted, there are models for this
to test, and we don't know where the gamma-rays are emitted. We don't
know exactly how the power is released, and by studying large classes of
these objects in their various flaring states and seeing the time
characteristics, the structure over time, over the life-time of the
mission, really that will give us key information for testing these
models. And I'm sure bringing forward our understanding of how these
incredible engines work.

Seth Borenstein:

Thank you.

Carol:

Our next question is from Robert Naeye, Sky and Telescope Magazine. Your
line is open.

Robert Naeye:

Yes, hi this is a question for both mainly for Peter and Steve, and then
I have a follow up question for Peter and Chip. The first question is;
whether you've detected or failed to detect any EGRET sources, in other
words EGRET sources that were active during the life time of the EGRET
mission and where you should have seen them with LAT but did not maybe
because they have turned off?

Peter Michelson:

Yeah, again this is primarily related to active galaxies, so-called
blazars. We know we did not expect to see all the blazars EGRET saw with
first light. So that's not a surprise. Because they're time variable,
and we may very well expect to see them sometime in the future if they
flare again. So that's not a surprise. As far as other sources like the
pulsars that I mentioned - in four days we saw every pulsar that EGRET
saw. If you stay tuned I think you'll hear some new results in that area
in the not-to-distant future.

Robert Naeye:

Great, and then a follow up question for Chip and Peter, is whether
there have been any simultaneous gamma-ray burst detections so far with
both the GBM instrument and the LAT instruments, since a certain subset
of gamma-ray bursts should be in the LAT field of view where it happens
to be looking?

Peter Michelson:

I'll take a shot at that first, we have not seen any gamma-ray bursts
yet with the LAT, and that is in fact consistent with expectations from
extrapolating EGRET, and as you know its extrapolations are
extrapolations, but we expected to see of order one or two bursts in a
couple of months, and its been a couple of months and we haven't seen
any. Chip can address whether the GBM bursts were in the field of view
of the LAT.

Charles "Chip" Meegan:

Okay, well there were some weak bursts in the field of view of the LAT,
but nothing that we saw that looked like a really good candidate. I
think there's been a little bit of bad luck. The bursts haven't been
cooperating with us very much. Of course GBM sees bursts in the energy
range where they're brightest so we can see really faint bursts. There
is no doubt were going to get some good ones. It's just a matter of
waiting.

Carol:

And our next question today will come from Carlos Martinho from O Estado
Ge S. Paulo. Your line is open.

Carlos Martinho:

Hi, questions for Dennis Kovar? The GLAST is not only an astrophysical
machine but a particle physics machine. And in next month in Europe the
LHC will be online. Is there any superposition of discoveries that are
expected from the Large Hadron Collider that GLAST could also do or are
they complementary? How did the expectations for the LHC and the
expectations for GLAST, now Fermi, how they add up?

Dennis Kovar:

So they really complement each other. I think you've heard some of the
discussion here about the fact that one of the major thrusts of GLAST is
to look for evidence of dark matter. At LHC if in fact one discovers
super symmetry particles, the lowest state is going to be the candidate
for dark matter and so these two instruments, this fantastic gamma-ray
observatory, and this high-energy accelerator are both have the
opportunities to make progress on the question of dark matter and so I
think they complement each other very well.

Carlos Martinho:

Thank you.

Carol:

And as a reminder, if anyone else would like to ask a question please
press star one...One moment please...And we have a question from Rachel
Courtland, New Scientist, your line is open please.

Rachel Courtland:

Yeah hi I guess this is a question for Steve; I was wondering if you
could explain what it is you are hoping to see as you're looking towards
the galactic center and what you see so far in terms of looking at like
dark matter or possibly discerning dark matter halos.

Steve Ritz:

Well thanks for the question; the center of the galaxy is an incredibly
busy place, very crowded place, therefore an incredibly interesting
place, and one of the great things about GLAST with our large field of
view is that we're seeing that, along with the sky all the time, so it's
not like we have to concentrate only in the center. That's one point. As
you point out if ideas about particle dark matter are right, then we'd
expect a large density or concentration of those dark matter particles
at the core of the galaxy and so that's a natural place to look for
signatures of those processes going on. Being able to pull that signal
out from all the other busy activity that's going on, all the other
gamma-ray traffic - is going to take some time I think. It's not the
kind of thing that we just turn on. I could be wrong, but I don't think
it's going to be the kind of thing that we're going to see in just the
first couple of months but rather it will take us a year or more of
investigation before we're able to make meaningful statements about
those signatures. That said, we know that there is a super massive black
hole at the core of our galaxy as with most galaxies and quite a lot of
high energy processes going on throughout the galaxy and at the center
of the galaxy as well. Does that answer your question?

Rachel Courtland:

It does thanks.

Carol:

Our next question will come from Clara Moskowitz from Space.com. Your
line is open.

Clara Moskowitz:

Hi, I think this is also for Steve or for anybody. I'm just wondering if
there were any unexpected issues during the initially space and check
out phase or did everything just work as expected?

Steve Ritz:

Well everything worked as expected and then some. I could, none of us
could have actually asked for such a smooth turn on, and it's a credit
to the world wide team of engineers, scientists, programmers and support
people who all worked together as a seamless team for many years to make
this thing turn on. It went like clockwork where we were actually ahead
of the clock. There of course were little hiccups along the way and some
challenges, little challenges, and problems to solve. But everything was
so fundamentally sound, it was such a great platform on which to work,
that I would characterize them as interesting exercises rather than
enormous challenges and that doesn't happen by accident. It was due to
all of this great preparation work, and the tight coupling I think
between scientists and all the other people I think that I mentioned
that enabled this to happen.

Clara Moskowitz:

Thanks.

Steve Ritz:

I'll just add; that we all just looked at each other in disbelief in the
hallway all the time for how well things were going.

Clara Moskowitz:

Thanks.

Carol:

And our next question is from Raphael Jaffe, Aero Tech News and Review.
Your line is open

Raphael Jaffe:

Okay, two questions; somebody mentioned that you can get multi-spectral
information, do I gather that you are able to not only follow the time
of these massive bursts but obtain the energy of the bursts? You know
how many, what are they? BeV measurements for these? Next question.
Okay, why don't we answer that and then I have a follow up.

Peter Michelson:

Yeah, this is Peter. I mentioned the energy range of the LAT, twenty MeV
to greater than three hundred GeV or BeV if you want to put it that way,
three hundred billion electron volt design. We measure the energy of
each of those photons. The accuracy varies across that energy band, but
it's an enormous energy band. So we obtain spectral information as well
as the time of the arrival and direction of each and every photon that
interacts in the instrument, with very high efficiency. In addition,
when I was talking about the flaring active galaxies, and I said
multi-wave length or multi-spectral, I was referring to the fact that
these objects emit radiation from radio to ultra high energy gamma-rays,
and to really understand what's going on we need to be able to see that
object across as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as possible.
That's not only GLAST, but involves other observatories, both ground and
space-based.

Charles "Chip" Meegan:

And if I could add on - the gamma-ray bursts, which you may be referring
to as well there, GBM contributes another three decades of energy below
the LAT range

Steve Ritz:

So if I could just put that into perspective, the ratio of the high
energy end to the low energy ends of the observatory with the GBM and
LAT together, is more than a factor of ten million. Put another way, if
GLAST were a piano, it would cover twenty-three octaves.

Raphael Jaffe:

Thank you, I was just curious about what the, I guess, this is for Mr.,
Dr. Morse, the cost of GLAST, Fermi, is it funded for how many further
years? That's the question.

Jon Morse

Sure, the approximate U.S contribution to the Fermi gamma-ray space
telescope, now named, is around six-hundred million dollars, and the
primary mission is for five years with a goal of ten years of on-orbit
operation.

Raphael Jaffe:

Okay, right and I'd have to go back to your presentations before launch,
as to the engineering life and all that good stuff. But sometimes it
seems the funding has been turned off, especially on scientific types of
projects while there is still data coming in? Would you like to comment
on that?

Jon Morse:

Sure, I can make the comment that our resources are not limitless and we
do need to prioritize within those existing resources. What we do is we
engage the science community when we look at our portfolio of missions,
and we call it the senior review of operating missions, we just
conducted one of these this spring. And we look at the whole portfolio
in how to achieve the best science for the resources we have. Sometimes
it's necessary to make tough decisions and to terminate a mission even
though it might still be able to send back data because our resources
are prioritized towards prior priority scientific objective and
facilities. We try not to do that, all of our missions provide unique
capabilities in one way or another, and so we try to keep observatories
that are bringing back data, try to keep them operating, and so right
now for example I mentioned that senior review of operating missions.
Our goal is to keep the nine operating missions that were included in
that list viable, at least for another year, and for all of them. And
we're going to try and see if we can get all of them into the next
review which would happen two years, hence in 2010, and then go through
that process again.

Raphael Jaffe:

Thank you; Is the results of that prioritization of that review of the
nine missions, available on the web or something?

Jon Morse

It is publicly available, I don't have a URL off the top of my head but
we could have J.D. provide that to you.

Raphael Jaffe:

Thank you very much. That is the end of my questions.

Carol:

And we do have a question from Seth Borenstein from the Associated
Press, your line is open.

Seth Borenstein:

Yes, thank you for taking a second question here. I guess this would be
for Chip; you talked about your averaging about one burst per day in
your observations, what was the expected rate from past GRO or EGRET
data? Is it fair to say that perhaps that the activity out there is far
more than you expected or did you expect it to be this active?

Charles "Chip" Meegan"

Well it certainly hasn't changed, but it is higher than I expected
because we're kind of opening up a new window as well. With BATSE, we
didn't have sophisticated a trigger as we do now, we're triggering on
different energy ranges, we're triggering on different time, integration
times, so we're doing a better job at detecting these weaker bursts.
It's working better than I expected actually. I expected to get two or
three hundred a year and it looks like it's going to be three hundred.

Seth Borenstein:

And how many were you getting on average before I guess?

Charles "Chip" Meegan:

Well with BATSE we got about three hundred a year.

Seth Borenstein:

So it really is not too dissimilar with what you got with BATSE? I guess
what I'm getting at, and I don't mean to be a pain here, my editors
don't want a story unless there is something new here and I'm trying to
find out what really - this holds a lot of promise for what we're going
to find in the future, but so far there is very little that you haven't
found that you've shown us that you haven't shown us before with BATSE?

Charles "Chip" Meegan:

That's true, we've just started operations. We've just started this
mission and it's going to be great. I guess that's the story, but you
know we've got about forty bursts so far, and of course that's far short
of the twenty seven hundred but give us ten years.

Seth Borenstein:

Okay.

Steve Ritz:

Let me perhaps add Chip, this is Steve. That it's the combination of the
GBM together with the LAT. Once we start seeing the bursts in the high
energy regime, the GBM is going to be vital to connect the frontier
measurements that the LAT will make with the more traditionally studied
and better understood at least phenomenologically, bursts. And we
weren't looking for the GBM by itself to open up, make a huge leap in
capabilities, but rather be an incredibly solid and important piece,
partner, in the high energy exploration of gamma-ray bursts.

Charles "Chip" Meegan:

Absolutely, it's not getting a record number of bursts; it's the bursts
that we'll see in common that will really advance our knowledge of what
gamma-ray bursts are doing, yes.

Seth Borenstein:

Alright, thank you.

Carol:

And this concludes the question and answer session of today's
conference; I would now like to turn the call back to Mr. J.D.
Harrington.

J.D. Harrington:

Thanks Carol; and that's going to do it for today's Fermi first light
telecon. I would like to thank the panelists for their time today,
andjust a reminder and a heads up, on the GLAST website I provided
earlier, [www.nasa.gov/GLAST](http://www.nasa.gov/GLAST), if you refresh
the page punching the F5 key, you'll find the link toward the bottom
called GLAST new name. You can go there and view today's press release,
information about the new name, Enrico Fermi's biography and the new
Fermi logo. You will need to log on, let me give you that, the logon is
GSFCTOPOST, once again that is GSFCTOPOST, and that's Goddard Space
Flight Center to Post. The password is GSFC123, GSFC123. Don't forget
that this telecon was recorded; you can dial in at 1-800-391-9845 any
time day or night for the next seven days. That number once again is
1-800-391-9845. The telecon briefing materials as well as information
about NASA's newest observatory, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope,
it's new logo, and Enrico Fermi's biography are all be available online,
once again its [www.nasa.gov/GLAST](http://www.nasa.gov/GLAST) . Finally
for more information about any of NASA's various projects, visit us on
the web at [www.nasa.gov](http://www.nasa.gov/). Again, thanks for
joining us and have a great day.

Carol:

This concludes today's conference, you may disconnect at this time.
Thank you.