HT-NewsThe PTR Group Helps Put Science Instrument In Orbit
GLAST Spacecraft Successfully Launched
/Software News Articles/ - HERNDON, VA - June 13, 2008 - The PTR Group Inc., a leading real-time and embedded technology and engineering services provider, today announced that one of the space-based science instruments it helped develop, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) was successfully launched on June 11, 2008 from NASA"s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida onboard the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) spacecraft. The spacecraft was placed into orbit via a Delta II "Heavy" rocket. The PTR Group is a significant contributor to the LAT instrument, working with the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, and the Department of Energy"s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, CA.
GLAST is a next generation high-energy gamma-ray observatory that employs two instruments to observe celestial gamma-ray sources. The primary instrument is the Large Area Telescope, which detects gamma rays with energies of 20 million electron volts to greater than 300 billion electron volts. The secondary instrument is the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM), which observes gamma ray bursts within its 2/3 sky field-of-view. The PTR Group is the embedded systems specialist responsible for the LAT start-up code and the instrument management software that controls its state during science operations. As experts in the area of VxWorks(R) flight software development, the PTR Group worked closely with software developers at NRL and SLAC to develop, test, and integrate this flight software.
"The PTR Group is very pleased to be a part of this scientific endeavor", said Todd Brackett, company President/CEO. "We hope our embedded software efforts will contribute to the overall success of the GLAST mission and the resultant science from the data produced by the instruments onboard."