AGILE launch

AGILE successfully launched today! Congratulations to the whole AGILE team. AGILE is a space based Gamma-Ray observatory, which has sensitivity in the 30Mev - 50Gev range. It also has a very large field of view, 3 steradians. This is the European entry into the Gamma-Ray observation game. I worked on the US competitor at Stanford called GLAST, which is set to launch this fall. GLAST has a much larger range of energy sensitivity, 20Mev - >300Gev and the same field of view. They both have great resolution due to the silicon strip detector technology on both satellites, and will be able to pin point the sources of high energy gamma-rays to 30 arcseconds. This is orders of magnitude more accuracy then we currently have with ground based observatories and with previous space based observatories (EGRET).
These satellites will both be scanning the sky for AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei), Gamma-Ray bursts, and many other gamma-ray sources. Gamma ray sources are the most energetic phenomena in the Universe and it will be interesting to see the science that comes out of both AGILE and GLAST.