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Session 33 - Gamma-ray Burst Counterparts and Afterglows.
Topical, Oral session, Tuesday, June 09
Friars,
The primary objective of the International High Energy Transient Explorer (HETE; launch in late 1999) is to carry out the systematic, multiwavelength study of gamma-ray bursts with gamma-ray, medium energy X-ray, and soft X-ray instruments mounted on a single, compact spacecraft. A scientific and technical team from France, Japan, and the US has collaborated in developing the HETE mission. To facilitate sensitive X-ray afterglow measurements, HETE is equipped with both an imaging proportional counter-based Wide-field X-ray Monitor (WXM), operating in the 2--25 keV band, and with an X-ray CCD-based Soft X-ray Camera (SXC), operating in the 0.5--10 keV band. A unique feature of the HETE mission is its potential for localizing GRBs with \sim 10^^\prime accuracy (medium energy X-ray emission) to \sim 10 ^^\prime \prime accuracy (soft X-ray emission), in real time aboard the spacecraft, and for transmitting these positions within \sim 1 minute directly to a global network of automated receivers, enabling rapid, sensitive follow-up studies in the radio, IR, and optical bands. Rapid (< 0.5 sec) re-broadcast of HETE ``burst alerts'' over the Internet will permit access to HETE positions worldwide.
