Lockheed Martin Space Systems Awarded One of Three Design Contracts for NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope

Lockheed Martin
Space Systems has been awarded one of three design contracts by the
Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) for NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area
Space Telescope (GLAST). Planned for launch in 2005, GLAST will
inaugurate a new epoch in space-based physics investigation.

“We’re extremely proud as a company to have been selected to
prepare designs for this very important mission,” said Dr. Domenick
Tenerelli, Space Systems program manager for GLAST. “A mission that
seeks to understand the most energetic events in the cosmos is
particularly exciting. We’re delighted to be able to work with NASA
Goddard on this fundamental mission to better understand the structure
and evolution of the universe.”

The Lockheed Martin Space Systems design will incorporate the LM
900 bus, used on the IKONOS commercial remote sensing spacecraft built
for Space Imaging EOSAT of Thornton, Colo. The LM 900 is ideal for
meeting the data, power distribution, and stability requirements for
GLAST.

Additionally, Space Systems brings to the table a long commitment
to space science. The company has provided spacecraft, as well as
systems engineering, integration and test, for the Hubble Space
Telescope, Lunar Prospector, Imager for Magnetopause to Aurora Global
Exploration, Gravity Probe-B, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility,
and the Space Interferometry Mission. Design concepts for NASA’s Next
Generation Space Telescope and the Terrestrial Planet Finder are also
in progress at the Space Systems facility in Sunnyvale.

Using the most powerful particle accelerators in the universe as
cosmic laboratories, GLAST will explore the extreme environments of
supermassive black holes, neutron stars, and gamma-ray bursts. On
cosmological scales, GLAST will explore the era of star formation in
the universe, the physics of dark matter and the creation and
evolution of galaxies.

GLAST is designed to operate in the energy range from 20 MeV to
300 GeV. It will provide a factor of better than 30 times the
sensitivity of the Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET)
onboard the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO).

GLAST will observe at least ten times as many active galactic
nuclei and stellar-mass black holes as previously detected in the
gamma-ray band. It will study pulsars and supernova remnants,
gamma-ray bursts, the diffuse Galactic and extragalactic high-energy
gamma-ray backgrounds, and solar flares. Since its source location
accuracy will be more than an order of magnitude better than that of
EGRET, it will be able to associate unidentified EGRET sources with
known celestial objects. GLAST will also search for annihilation-line
radiation from weakly interacting massive particles, known as WIMPs,
which may account for the dark matter.

The mission’s scientific objectives require a high-energy
gamma-ray telescope with angular resolution sufficient to identify
point sources with objects at other wavelengths, a wide field-of-view
that will permit the study of sources that exhibit extreme intensity
variations on timescales from seconds to months or longer, and a large
effective area to detect a large sample of sources and determine their
energy spectra. New detector technologies that offer significant
improvements over existing hardware (a factor of between 10 and 100
improvement in source sensitivity, depending on energy) will allow
these requirements to be met well within the cost constraints of an
intermediate class astrophysics mission. Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md., will manage the GLAST mission for NASA’s Office of
Space Science, in Washington.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems, in Sunnyvale, is a leading supplier
of satellites and space systems to military, civil government and
commercial communications organizations around the world. These
spacecraft and systems have enhanced military and commercial
communications; provided new and timely remote-sensing information,
and furnished new data for thousands of scientists studying our planet
and the universe.

For more information about Lockheed Martin Space
Systems-Sunnyvale, see our website at http://lmms.external.lmco.com.