A NASA cubesat designed to search for the most powerful and violent explosions in the universe has successfully detected its first massive explosion, space agency officials announced earlier this week.
BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite placed into orbit in April to detect and study gamma-ray bursts, or GRBNASA has spotted a “mega-explosion” in the small constellation Microscopium in the southern sky. The cosmic explosion occurred on June 29 and, in less than two seconds, shone a quintillion times brighter than the sun, NASA said in a statement. recent statement.
“We are excited to collect scientific data,” Sean Semper, BurstCube chief engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement. “This is a significant milestone for the team and for the many engineers and early-career scientists who participated in the mission.”
BurstCube is designed to specifically search for “shorts” gamma ray burstswhich last just two seconds or less but offer rare insights into the end-of-life processes of massive stars and the birth of black holes.
Short GRBs typically occur when neutron stars, which are superdense remnants of massive stars that died explosively, collide with other neutron stars or black holes. Such mergers also produce detectable ripples in spacetime, called gravitational wavesallowing astronomers to study the nature of neutron stars and their resulting GRBs beyond what can be inferred from visible light alone. GRBs are also known to create rare chemical elements such as gold and platinum as well as life-supporting ingredients including iodine and thorium as byproducts.
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GRBs were discovered by accident in 1963 by U.S. military satellites searching for gamma rays from banned Soviet nuclear tests. Yet more than half a century later, the precise mechanisms that produce these fleeting but extraordinarily powerful flashes of light remain unclear. remain shrouded in mystery.
To catalog short GRBs from its vantage point in Earth orbit, BurstCube is equipped with four circular gamma-ray detectors arranged to provide the satellite with a wide view of the sky, helping scientists infer the direction of an event. A gamma ray hitting one of the detectors is first converted into visible light and then into a pulse of electrons, according to the mission description.
BurstCube is one of four small satellites that were launched into low orbit from the International Space Station in April. Shortly afterward, the mission team discovered that one of its two solar panels wasn’t fully extended and was obscuring the view of its star-tracking system, which the satellite uses to orient itself to minimize atmospheric drag.
Due to this problem, the satellite is expected to succumb to increased drag in September and re-enter the atmosphere, reducing the mission’s initial duration from 12 to 18 months to just six months.
“I am proud of how the team responded to the situation and made the best use of the time we have in orbit,” Jeremy Perkins, BurstCube principal investigator at Goddard, said in the NASA statement. “Small missions like BurstCube not only provide an opportunity to conduct great science and test new technologies, such as our mission’s gamma-ray detector, but also important learning opportunities for promising members of the astrophysics community.”
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