Space Scope's Fast Reflexes to Record Explosions

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<b>Space Scope's Fast Reflexes to Record Explosions </b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />A satellite with lightning-fast reflexes will soon attempt to glimpse the most powerful - and fleeting - explosions in the universe. <br /><br />The Swift telescope is set to launch aboard a Delta II rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in mid-November, pending the launch of other US Air Force rockets, NASA officials said on Monday.<br /><br />Once in orbit, Swift will scan one sixth of the sky at a time, searching for brief volleys of gamma-ray photons that - in just seconds - exceed the energy output of the Sun over its entire lifetime. <br /><br />These gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are thought to be the birth cries of black holes that form when massive stars collapse in so-called hypernovae. Some bursts might represent the most distant observable objects - like flashbulbs popping off from the first generation of stars.<br /><br />"If you had gamma-ray glasses, GRBs would dominate your life," says principal investigator Neil Gehrels, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It would be like the Moon flashing on and off several times per night."<br /><br /><br />Chasing the afterglow <br /><br /><br />But not much is known about these events because they occur randomly in the sky and typically last less than a minute. Scientists can glean more information about them, however, by studying their X-ray and optical afterglows, which can linger for hours or days.<br /><br />But only a few dozen GRBs have been observed at multiple wavelengths to date. This is because it takes about six hours to alert astronomers of GRB detections so they can point their telescopes toward the afterglows - which can be thousands of times dimmer by then.<br /><br />Now, if a GRB occurs in Swift's field of view, the telescope will automatically swivel to observe it - across a range of wavelengths - i