Of my friends from grad school, John Spitzak and I am the only ones left without a satellite of our own. :( To be fair, Lori Allen lost her first one (WIRE) into the ocean, but is doing well with SIRTF.
OTOH, we may not be quite out of the running.
(also via boing boing)
"Launching a small satellite carrying a telescope into orbit costs around $100 million," says Boggs, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics. "But for about $1 million, a balloon can get you above 99 percent of the atmosphere. So balloon flights are great for testing out new instruments that may eventually go up in space."
The telescope was built at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory where Boggs specializes in gamma ray astronomy. The rays are of such high energy that they can travel incredibly long distances to give us glimpses of phenomena in the deepest regions of space.
"Gamma ray astrophysics is the study of some of the most exotic things our universe has to offer, like matter falling into the edge of a black hole or the surface of neutron stars," Boggs says.
As an undergrad I worked for Gordon Garmire on AXAF. One of the things he had us do was design Wolter type I, X-ray telescopes. I wonder if there is something that could be thrown together with a 5-Mpx CCD, some scrap steel and a car battery?
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How would you stablize and point such a thing? The integration time for 50-300Kev photons would be minutes.
dunno, but if it held for even a few tens of seconds you could resolve out GRBs.
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