HEPL NEWS
Request a copy of the HEPL Brochure by contacting Nancy Christiansen.
Or download
a scanned version.
Faculty Only
sunet id required
Forms
sunet id required
image courtesy of NASA GLAST Launches Into SpaceThe GLAST mission begins with a thunderous liftoff.
|
NASA's GLAST Launch Successful CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE STATION, Fla. -- NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, successfully launched aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 12:05 p.m. EDT Wednesday June 11, 2008..The GLAST observatory separated from the second stage of the Delta II at 1:20 p.m. and the flight computer immediately began powering up the components necessary to control the satellite. Twelve minutes after separating from the launch vehicle, both GLAST solar arrays were deployed. The arrays immediately began producing the power necessary to maintain the satellite and instruments. The operations team continues to check out the spacecraft subsystems. "The entire GLAST Team is elated the observatory is now on-orbit and all systems continue to operate as planned," said GLAST program manager Kevin Grady of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. After a 75-minute flight, the GLAST spacecraft was deployed into low Earth orbit. It will begin to transmit initial instrument data after about three weeks. The telescope will explore the most extreme environments in the universe, searching for signs of new laws of physics and investigating what composes mysterious dark matter. It will seek explanations for how black holes accelerate immense jets of material to nearly light speed, and look for clues to crack the mysteries behind powerful explosions known as gamma-ray bursts. "After a 60-day checkout and initial calibration period, we'll begin science operations," said Steve Ritz, GLAST project scientist at Goddard. "GLAST soon will be telling scientists about many new objects to study, and this information will be available on the internet for the world to see." NASA's GLAST mission is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the U.S. For more information about the GLAST mission, please visit: NASA Press Release 6/11/08 |
 Closeup of a CDMS detector, made of crystal germanium.Credit: Fermilab. Larger Image |
Crystal bells stay silent as physicists look for dark matter U.S. experiment retakes the lead in competitive race Batavia, Ill.--Scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment today announced that they have regained the lead in the worldwide race to find the particles that make up dark matter. The CDMS experiment, conducted a half-mile underground in a mine in Soudan, Minn., again sets the world’s best constraints on the properties of dark matter candidates. “With our new result we are leapfrogging the competition,” said Blas Cabrera of Stanford University, co-spokesperson of the CDMS experiment, for which the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory hosts the project management. “We have achieved the world’s most stringent limits on how often dark matter particles interact with ordinary matter and how heavy they are, in particular in the theoretically favored mass range of more than 40 times the proton mass. Our experiment is now sensitive enough to hear WIMPs even if they ring the ‘bells’ of our crystal germanium detector only twice a year. So far, we have heard nothing.”
|
)
Welcome!
The development and application of advanced technology to science is a central element of HEPL and the source of its uniqueness. Over the last three decades, HEPL has developed a base of advanced technology in cryogenics and metrology. The technical investment has positioned scientists in HEPL to be at the forefront of important areas in science which could not even be considered at other institutions lacking the technical base. Stanford is fortunate in having a group of scientists associated with vision to apply it to leading scientific problems.
Visitor Information
This site is best viewed with Mozilla Firefox or Safari