Gamma-ray Large-Area Space Telescope (GLAST) balloon flight data handling overview

Author

Burnett, T.H. ; Chekhtman, A. ; E Silva, E. Do Couto ; Dubois, R. ; Flath, D. ; Gable, I. ; Grove, J.E. ; Hartman, R.C. ; Kamae, T. ; Kavelaars, A. ; Kelly, H. ; Kotani, T. ; Kuss, M. ; Lauben, D. ; Lindner, T. ; Lumb, N. ; Mizuno, T. ; Moiseev, A. ; Ozak

Author_Institution

Washington Univ., Seattle, WA, USA

Volume

49

Issue

4

fYear

2002

fDate

8/1/2002 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1904

Lastpage

1908

Abstract

The Gamma-ray Large-Area Space Telescope (GLAST) balloon flight engineering model (BFEM) represents one of 16 towers that constitute the Large Area Telescope (LAT), a high-energy (> 20 MeV) gamma-ray pair-production telescope being built by an international partnership of astrophysicists and particle physicists for a satellite launch in 2006. The prototype tower consists of a Pb/Si pair-conversion tracker (TKR), a CsI hodoscopic calorimeter (CAL), an anticoincidence detector (ACD), and an autonomous data acquisition (DAQ) system. The self-triggering capabilities and performance of the detector elements have been previously characterized using positron, photon and hadron beams. External target scintillators were placed above the instrument to act as sources of hadronic showers. This paper provides a comprehensive description of the BFEM data-reduction process, from receipt of the flight data from telemetry through event reconstruction and background rejection cuts. The goals of the ground analysis presented here are to verify the functioning of the instrument and to validate the reconstruction software and the background-rejection scheme.

Keywords

aerospace instrumentation; astronomical telescopes; coincidence techniques; data acquisition; data reduction; electron pair production; gamma-ray detection; nuclear electronics; particle calorimetry; solid scintillation detectors; BFEM; CAL; CsI; CsI hodoscopic calorimeter; DAQ system; GLAST; Gamma-Ray Large-Area Space Telescope; LAT; Large Area Telescope; Pb/Si pair-conversion tracker; TKR; anticoincidence detector; autonomous data acquisition system; background rejection; background-rejection; balloon flight data handling overview; balloon flight engineering model; data-reduction process; event reconstruction; external target scintillators; gamma-ray pair-production telescope; hadronic showers; reconstruction software; Aerospace engineering; Data acquisition; Data handling; Design engineering; Instruments; Poles and towers; Prototypes; Satellites; Target tracking; Telescopes;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TNS.2002.801536

Filename

1043589