re gamma ray bursters positional stuff henry zoo toronto edu henry spencer writes in article apr vax mankato msus edu belgarath vax mankato msus edu writes actually my advisor another classmate of mine and me were talking the other day about putting just one detector on one of the pluto satellites then we realized that the satellite alone is only carrying something like pounds of eq well a batse detector needs lead shielding to protect it and alone weighs about pounds itself actually the situation is even worse than that the total mass of the pluto fast flyby spacecraft is only ish pounds and most of that is support equipment like power and communications the mass available for instruments is maybe of that i don t think a batse will fit from the pluto fast flyby instrument definition research anouncemnet the instrument payload constraints are mass allocation kilograms lbs power allocation watts required instruments visible imaging system x ccd mm fl f optics ir mapping spectrometer x hgcdte array energy resolution uv spectrometer nm nm resolution radio science ultrastable oscilator incorporated in telecom system ultrastable means this doesn t leave much room for payloads which are totally unrelated to the mission of the spacecraft in addition the power will come from a radioisotope thermal generator and the whole space craft will be about feet in diameter with no booms which means there will be strong gamma lines from pu and associated schmutz in the background which tends to reduce sensitivity somewhat it would still be nice and our group here at goddard is looking in to it david m palmer palmer alumni caltech edu palmer tgrs gsfc nasa gov
