June 13, 2008
On your birthday, photons that left distant stars before humans walked the Earth finally completed their journey. You began yours.
At Last, GLAST
Birthday · June 13, 2008
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published June 13, 2008. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Rising through a billowing cloud of smoke, this Delta II rocket left Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's launch pad 17-B Wednesday at 12:05 pm EDT. Snug in the payload section was GLAST, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, now in orbit around planet Earth. GLAST's detector technology was developed for use in terrestrial particle accelerators. But from orbit, GLAST can study gamma-rays from extreme environments in our own Milky Way galaxy, as well as supermassive black holes at the centers of distant active galaxies, and the sources of powerful gamma-ray bursts. Those cosmic accelerators achieve energies not attainable in earthbound laboratories. GLAST also has the sensitivity to search for signatures of new physics in the relatively unexplored high-energy gamma-ray regime.