J.E. McEnery (NASA/GSFC), W.B. Atwood (University of California, Santa Cruz), S.W. Digel (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), T.H. Burnett (University of Washington), LAT Collaboration
The Large Area Telescope (LAT), under construction for launch in early 2007 on the Gamma-ray Large-Area Space Telescope (GLAST) mission, will survey the sky in the energy range from 20 MeV to >300 GeV. The detector subsystems of the LAT, a pair conversion tracker, a scintillating crystal calorimeter, and a plastic scintillator anticoincidence shield, will permit efficient discrimination of the intense background of charged particles and provide much greater angular resolution, effective area, and field of view for gamma rays than the highly successful EGRET detector on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. We describe the detailed simulations of particle interactions and the reconstruction and classification of events in the LAT that (together with beam tests of prototypes) were used to design the LAT and to derive its expected performance. By every measure, including sensitivity, high-energy response, and dead time, the LAT will vastly increase the scope of astronomy in the GeV range.
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.