SESDA II Supports Exploration of the Extreme Universe
September 1, 2009
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is a powerful orbiting observatory designed to examine the universe in the most extreme high-energy regime, revealing new information about black holes, pulsars, and the extraordinary phenomena known as gamma-ray bursts. SESDA II scientists and programmers have been involved in supporting the mission from its early design phase through launch and have recently achieved two major milestones: the opening of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) data server and the public release of the Fermi Science Tools. The data server is the primary tool by which the scientific community will obtain Fermi data. It is populated with LAT data in several formats, allows sophisticated searches by users, and automatically creates and posts weekly gamma-ray sky images, an example of which is shown below.
The Science Tools software suite contains all of the software that the community will use to analyze the data obtained from the LAT data server. As the analysis process matures, refinements and extensions to these tools will be required but the SESDA II team’s strong configuration management procedures, combined with their scientific expertise, will allow them to quickly modify, test and release robust new versions of the software to meet the needs of the scientific community and the Fermi mission team.
