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C. Markwardt (NASA/GSFC & U. Maryland), Swift/BAT Instrument Team
The Swift gamma-ray burst observatory is scheduled for launch in November, 2004. Swift will detect gamma-ray bursts and autonomously perform follow up observations on the afterglows within several tens of seconds. The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) is a wide-field coded-aperture telescope on board Swift. It is sensitive to gamma-ray bursts on many time scales (> 4 ms) in the 15-150 keV band. While Swift is not responding to gamma-ray bursts, the BAT will be observing the sky in survey mode. With a large field of view of >2 sr, galactic X/gamma-ray sources will be observed serendipitously. In addition, during the activation and performance verification phases, planned for the first 135 days of the mission, bright galactic sources will be used for BAT calibration. We expect to provide preliminary results from these observations.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.