NASA's GLAST gets shades, blankets for the beach

At the Astrotech payload processing facility near Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a worker looks over the star tracker sun shades just installed on the GLAST spacecraft. Click here for more information.

GREENBELT, Md. - NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, is receiving finishing touches at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, near the beaches of eastern central Florida for its launch. The spacecraft is set for launch aboard a Delta II rocket no earlier than June 3. The launch window runs from 11:45 a.m. to 1:40 p.m. EDT.

Housed at the Astrotech Facility located near the Kennedy Space Center, Fla., GLAST is getting a lot of attention from engineers and scientists, from sun shades to thermal blankets, to final inspection.

Recently, sun shades were installed on GLAST. "These are light shades on the star tracker optics (optics that measure where the observatory is pointing) that keep light outside of the field of view from obscuring the star field," said Al Vernacchio, GLAST Deputy Project Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "Sun shades are like a visor you flip down in your car on a sunny day to block the Sun's glare so you can see the road," said Steve Ritz, GLAST Project Scientist at Goddard. They "shade" the star tracker field-of-view from stray light coming from the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, so GLAST's star trackers can see the needed reference stars. GLAST uses reference stars to check its orientation. Basically, GLAST is navigated using both GPS and the stars.

Once the shades are installed, temporary covers are placed on the open part of the shades to protect the optics from debris. These covers are removed after the rocket fairing (shell of the rocket where GLAST will sit) is installed on the launch vehicle prior to flight.