re gamma ray bursters positional stuff 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 actually would you need the shielding my understanding is that it s mostly there to give the detectors some directionality no point in doing that if you ve only got one i m sure the burst detectors that have flown on other deep space missions haven t weighed that much mind you they re probably still too heavy the pff people would put more pluto specific instruments on first if they had any mass to spare svr resembles a high speed collision henry spencer u of toronto zoology between svr and sunos dick dunn henry zoo toronto edu utzoo henry
