Fermi Large Area Telescope operations: progress over 4 years

摘要

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was launched into orbit in June 2008, and is conducting a multi-year gammarayall-sky survey, using the main instrument on Fermi, the Large Area Telescope (LAT). Fermi began its sciencemission in August 2008, and has now been operating for almost 4 years. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratoryhosts the LAT Instrument Science Operations Center (ISOC), which supports the operation of the LAT in conjunctionwith the Mission Operations Center (MOC) and the Fermi Science Support Center (FSSC), both at NASA's GoddardSpace Flight Center. The LAT has a continuous output data rate of about 1.5 Mbits per second, and data from the LATare stored on Fermi and transmitted to the ground through TDRS and the MOC to the ISOC about 10 times per day.Several hundred computers at SLAC are used to process LAT data to perform event reconstruction, and gamma-rayphoton data are subsequently delivered to the FSSC for public release with a few hours of being detected by the LAT.We summarize the current status of the LAT, and the evolution of the data processing and monitoring performed by theISOC during the first 4 years of the Fermi mission, together with future plans for further changes to detected event dataprocessing and instrument operations and monitoring.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.