What is the Burst Alert Telescope and how does it work?
Dr. Scott Barthelmy: Well, first I’d like to say that, while I was the lead scientist on the Burst Alert Telescope on the Swift mission, there were many other people involved. Approximately 70 or 80 people were involved in the project and they all played important roles, contributing greatly to the design and success of the BAT instrument. I just want to get that on the record. The Burst Alert Telescope is one of three instruments on the Swift mission. It was launched four years ago (Nov. 20, 2004) to study gamma-ray bursts in the universe. It’s a wide-field-of-view instrument, about a hundred degrees field-of-view. It needs to look at a large region of the sky to catch these gamma-ray bursts, and when one goes off it quickly calculates the position inside the BAT instrument and sends it to the spacecraft, which then autonomously decides – with no humans in the loop – if it’s safe to slew to this new location and point the other two instruments that are on the Swift observatory. There’
