Swift
About Swift
Swift is NASA's gamma-ray burst explorer mission. The wide field hard X-ray monitor called Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) detects and localize a gamma-ray burst (GRB). The spacecraft autonomously repoints to a GRB location to bring the field of the X-ray telescope (XRT) and the UV/Optical telescope (UVOT). Swift observes ~100 GRBs per year.
The Yoshida-lab's assistant professor, Taka Sakamoto, is the instrument team member of BAT.
Swift/BAT monitors the sky in the 15-200 keV band thanks to its wide field of view (1.4 sr). On the other hand, the MAXI GSC monitors the all-sky in the 2-20 keV band every 90 min. Our transient monitor combines the data of the Swift/BAT and MAXI/GSC data to cover the broad spectral coverage of 2-200 keV for known 106 high energy transient sources. The paper explainig about our pipeline has been accepted for publication in PASJ.
The initial data (data within 7 days after its observation) of Swift are archived at the Swift Quick-Look site of the Swift Data Center (SDC) located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. All the data at this Swift QL site are mirrored at the web server of AGU.
The Swift data more than 7 days old are archived at the HEASARC. All the Swift/BAT data since December 2004 are mirrored at the web server of AGU.
All the Swift/XRT data on the Swift quick-look site are analyzed automatically every three hours when the new data are available. The original script is developed by Goro Sato (ISAS/JAXA).
Automatic script to find X-ray transients analyzing the Swift quick-look data of Swift/XRT. The script runs every hour. When there is an uncatalog source in the Swift/XRT image, the script notify us.