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T.C. Weekes (VERITAS Collaboration, Whipple Observatory)
VERITAS (the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) is the next generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory that is being built in southern Arizona by a collaboration of ten institutions in Canada, Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S.A. It will use the atmospheric Cherenkov imaging technique that was developed by the collaboration at the Whipple Observatory and which has been used to detect both galactic and extragalactic sources of TeV gamma rays. VERITAS is designed to operate in the energy range from 50 GeV to 50 TeV with optimal sensitivity near 200 GeV; it will effectively overlap with the next generation of space-based gamma-ray telescopes.
The design of VERITAS will be described, its scientific objectives outlined, and the present status of construction detailed. In addition to lowering the energy threshold of the technique by a factor of 4, the flux sensitivity will be improved by a factor of 10-20. The prototype telescope has been built and its properties will be described. The first phase of VERITAS, consisting of four telescopes, of 12 m aperture, will be operational by the time of the GLAST launch in 2006. Eventually the array will be expanded to include the full array of seven telescopes as a filled hexagonal grid of side 80 m.
VERITAS is being funded by DOE, NSF, the Smithsonian Institution, PPARC (UK), Enterprise-Ireland, and NSERC (Canada).
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://veritas.sao.arizona.edu/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: tweekes@cfa.harvard.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.