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Session 71 - Space Astronomy in the Next Millennium.
Display session, Wednesday, January 17
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The Energetic Transient Array (ETA) is a proposed constellation of six microsatellites in heliocentric orbits designed to accurately locate gamma ray bursts (GRB's) from cosmic sources. Correlating arrival times and microsatellite locations over the array serves to determine angular source locations. These locations are expected to be several orders of magnitude more accurate, in terms of angular error box areas, than has been previously achieved: sub-arc-second error box dimensions are expected to be achieved for 10-40 GRB's over the course of the ETA mission. In two years of observations, the ETA will localize \sim75 sources to better than 3 arc-seconds and \sim150 sources to better than 10 arc-seconds. In total the ETA will localize \sim800 GRB's to higher accuracy than previously achieved by any other observations. These levels of accuracy are achieved by eliminating the systematic timing and satellite location uncertainties and detector mismatches that have affected previous GRB interplanetary networks.
