It seems I suggested to the GLAST people at one point, when the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope was still in a pre-launch test phase, that they try pointing the telescope straight up into the sky and turn the instrument on to see what they could read.\u00a0 As long as the anti-coincidence shield did not activate, there would be a gamma ray fog from the earth\u2019s atmosphere, considerably stronger than the diffuse background that is found with the telescope now in space and pointing away from the earth.\u00a0 With a planned schedule already at the time, they probably did not try it.<\/p>\n
As far as new equipment goes, another way to test whether or not our atmosphere emits gamma rays is to send a gamma ray telescope up as the payload of a high altitude balloon.\u00a0 The instrument would point at an acute angle to the vertical so as to keep the balloon itself out of the picture.\u00a0 As the balloon ascends to high altitude there should be a gradually decreasing flux density of gamma rays.\u00a0 The energies to look for are centered on 312.76 MeV.<\/p>\n
The suggestion would otherwise be to place the instrument looking out an opening of a high altitude engine propelled aircraft as it ascends, except that vibrations may at times affect the readability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems I suggested to the GLAST people at one point, when the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope was still in a pre-launch test phase, that they try pointing the telescope straight up into the sky and turn the instrument on to see what they could read.\u00a0 As long as the anti-coincidence shield did not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astrophysics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":466,"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions\/466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fruechtetheory.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}