Eye on the sky

PSU scientists monitor gamma ray bursts for earthly insights

By Lauren Boyer

- For the CDT

Conquering the final frontier is a job that starts each morning with a teleconference at the Swift Satellite Mission Operations Center — a little-noticed building in a Ferguson Township business park.

Nine or so Penn State scientists huddle around a conference table, for a dynamic — and to an outsider, often incomprehensible — discussion of which mysteries of the universe they’ll probe next with the help of the minivan-size Swift satellite, orbiting 400 miles above.

“We’re discovering things every day,” said David Burrows, head of Swift’s X-ray and science operations team. “This is the sort of thing most of us got into astronomy to do.”

These stargazers don’t wish on stars. They watch them blow up.

NASA launched Swift from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Nov. 20, 2004, with the mission to investigate gamma ray bursts, intense explosions of stars morphing into black holes.

“Other than the big bang at the beginning of the universe, these are the brightest things we have ever seen,” said John Nousek, director of the Swift mission.

The satellite is controlled by Penn State from offices in the Bristol business park, across West College Avenue from Harner Farm. You’d hardly know it’s there.

Swift gets its name from its ability to spot these intergalactic firework displays as they happen and quickly pivot to use its three telescopes to capture images of explosions that may last only fractions of a second.

In September, Swift captured a gamma ray burst 12.8 billion light years away, the most distant burst ever detected. Because it takes time for light to travel through space, such explosions are a glimpse back in time — in this case, back to when the universe was still changing from a “uniform soupy thing” and forming the first galaxies, Nousek said.

Research has been booming, Nousek said, adding that Penn State has been working for two years to acquire another satellite. Last week, the Swift team competed at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, becoming one of six finalists for two satellite launch slots.

Astronomers worldwide notify Swift officials through an online form whenever they want the satellite to observe a particular cosmic curiosity. One morning last week, scientist Margaret Chester scrolled through her BlackBerry to reveal a list of new requests.

Five years ago, the team received a couple of requests per week. Now, it’s hard to keep up with the demand.

Swift averages five to seven requests per day, Burrows said. The scientists decide what bursts are worthy of investigation during the morning teleconference, on which one can hear a variety of foreign accents.

“All these disembodied voices you hear, they are all over the world,” Nousek said.

The satellite is a collaborative effort with NASA and institutions in England and Italy. Swift, which moves at a speed of more than four miles per second, passes over an antenna in Malindi, Kenya, about 11 times per day.

From there, the data is transmitted to the mission operations center in State College and into the hands of the flight operations team, which comprises five Penn State graduates.

Mark Hilliard, head of the flight operations team and a 1988 graduate, ensures Swift doesn’t encounter an “Indiana Jones” — getting trapped between the sun, moon and Earth.

Gamma ray bursts never sleep. Sometimes, neither do Swift’s scientists, who try to catch the bursts in action.

“I’ll be in my living room on my laptop talking to a lot of other people who are also in their pajamas,” said scientist Mike Siegel.

In tough economic times, Nousek knows people question the necessity of a space program. But to him, it’s a “how did we get here kind of thing.”

“No, starving people are not fed by us knowing there are gamma ray bursts,” he said. “But we enrich people by showing them what the universe is like.”