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1995-05-02
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Compton Status Report 12/23/91
ARTHUR HOLLY COMPTON GAMMA RAY OBSERVATORY
MONTHLY STATUS REPORT
December 23, 1991
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center-managed Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory (Compton) spacecraft and its instruments continue to
perform well.
Compton is in normal pointing mode with solar arrays pointed
toward the Sun. The observatory is oriented with the +Z axis
pointed at the binary star SCO X-1. As of December 19, Compton
was in an orbit with an apogee of 268.7 miles (432.5 kilometers),
and a perigee of 262.1 miles (422 kilometers), period of 93.1
minutes, and inclination of 28.5 degrees.
The Goddard flight operations team reports the observatory is
functioning well. Tape Recorder B is now the primary recorder
for mission data, supplemented with realtime data. This change
was made November 26, 1991 when the number of bit errors detected
in Tape Recorder A rose to a level above the acceptable range.
Tape Recorder A will be used as a backup, and its performance
will continue to be monitored. Since the changeover to Tape
Recorder B, which shows an acceptably low error rate, the error
rate in Tape Recorder A has decreased by 25 to 40 percent.
Goddard's Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) is
performing normal operations for the science mission. EGRET
operations continue to run better than expected, according to
project officials.
The Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) continues to
perform exceptionally well, according to scientists at the
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL. As of December 16,
BATSE had detected 197 cosmic gamma-ray bursts. The source of
these bursts remains a mystery.
The Imaging Compton Telescope (COMPTEL) continues to operate
normally, the scientists at the Max-Planck Institute, Germany,
reported.
The Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE),
managed by the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, is
performing normal operations for the science mission. The OSSE
instrument also continues to operate well.
The next Compton maneuver will be to the 17th scheduled phase-
one target, Supernova 1987 A, planned for December 27. This
observation holds special significance for the scientific team
because it will help either to prove or disprove theories about
the decay of radioactive material in the wake of a stellar
explosion. One theory is that the reason optical telescopes
notice a leveling-off of the rate of dimming in the supernova
remnant is because radioactive decay is fueling the visible
emissions. Because gamma rays are emitted during radioactive
decay, Compton is the ideal instrument to search for this
evidence.
The Compton Observatory is managed and operated by Goddard for
NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications.