The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) on the SWIFT Midex Mission

By S. Barthelmy, L. Barbier, J. Cummings, E. Fenimore, N. Gehrels, D. Hullinger, H. Krimm, C. Markwardt, D. Palmer, A. Parsons and 5 more. SPIE Optics + Photonics, 2004

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Abstracthe burst alert telescope (BAT) is one of three instruments on the Swift MIDEX spacecraft to study gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The BAT first detects the GRB and localizes the burst direction to an accuracy of 1–4 arcmin within 20 s after the start of the event. The GRB trigger initiates an autonomous spacecraft slew to point the two narrow field-of-view (FOV) instruments at the burst location within 20–70 s so to make follow-up X-ray and optical observations. The BAT is a wide-FOV, coded-aperture instrument with a CdZnTe detector plane. The detector plane is composed of 32,768 pieces of CdZnTe (4×4×2 mm), and the coded-aperture mask is composed of ∼52,000 pieces of lead (5×5×1 mm) with a 1-m separation between mask and detector plane. The BAT operates over the 15–150 keV energy range with ∼7 keV resolution, a sensitivity of ∼10−8 erg s−1 cm−2, and a 1.4 sr (half-coded) FOV. We expect to detect > 100 GRBs/year for a 2-year mission. The BAT also performs an all-sky hard X-ray survey with a sensitivity of ∼2 m Crab (systematic limit) and it serves as a hard X-ray transient monitor.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

• The PalermoSwift-BAT hard X-ray catalogue: II. Results after 39 months of sky survey (2009, background): “The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT; Barthelmy et al. 2005) on board theSwift observatory (Gehrels et al. 2004), with its large field of view (100◦ × 60◦ half coded) and large detector area (a factor of 2 greater than ISGRI) offers the opportunity for a large increase of the sample of objects that…”
• THE COSMIC RATE, LUMINOSITY FUNCTION, AND INTRINSIC CORRELATIONS OF LONG GAMMA-RAY BURSTS (2009, background): “This is due in part to the narrow energy bandpass of the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT; Barthelmy et al. 2005), which precludes direct measurement of the broad GRB spectra and tends to weaken any inferences about the νFν spectral peak energy Epk,obs and the bolometric GRB fluence.”
• BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey. V. X-Ray Properties of the Swift/BAT 70-month AGN Catalog (2017, background): “Finally, the NASA mission Swift (Gehrels et al. 2004), launched in 2005, carries on board the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT, Barthelmy et al. 2005; Krimm et al. 2013).”
• THE EVOLUTION OF SWIFT/BAT BLAZARS AND THE ORIGIN OF THE MeV BACKGROUND (2009, background): “The Swift/BAT sample The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT; Barthelmy et al. 2005) onboard the Swift satellite (Gehrels et al. 2004), represents a major improvement in sensitivity for imaging of the hard X-ray sky.”
• A burst in a wind bubble and the impact on baryonic ejecta: high-energy gamma-ray flashes and afterglows from fast radio bursts and pulsar-driven supernova remnants (2016, background): “Based on these results, we encourage further soft gamma-ray searches especially with Swift.”
• COMPTON-THICK ACCRETION IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2015, methodology): “In the local universe hard X-ray detectors such as the Burst Alert Monitor (BAT, Barthelmy et al. 2005) on board Swift (Gehrels et al. 2004), the IBIS/ISGRI on board INTEGRAL (Winkler et al. 2003), and FPMA/FPMB on board NuSTAR (Harrison et al. 2013) are therefore well suited for detecting and…”
• THREE-YEAR SWIFT–BAT SURVEY OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI: RECONCILING THEORY AND OBSERVATIONS? (2010, background): “The BAT (Barthelmy et al. 2005) on board the Swift satellite (Gehrels et al. 2004) represents a major improvement in sensitivity for imaging of the hard X-ray sky.”
• Swift J1112.2−8238: a candidate relativistic tidal disruption flare (2015, background): “The outburst of Swift J1112-8238 was originally discovered by the Swift telescope (Gehrels et al. 2004) in a four day integration by the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT, Barthelmy et al. 2005) between 2011 June 16 and 19 (MJD 55728-55731, Krimm et al. 2011).”
• The physics of gamma-ray bursts & relativistic jets (2014, background): “The breakthrough led by Swift unveiled that some nearby short GRBs (or short GRBs with EE) have host galaxies that are elliptical or early-type, with little star formation (Gehrels et al., 2005; Barthelmy et al., 2005c; Berger et al., 2005).”
• A PANCHROMATIC VIEW OF THE RESTLESS SN 2009ip REVEALS THE EXPLOSIVE EJECTION OF A MASSIVE STAR ENVELOPE (2013, methodology): “We constrain the hard X-ray emission from SN 2009ip exploiting our Swift-BAT (Burst Alert Telescope, Barthelmy et al. 2005) campaign with observations obtained between 2012 September 4 (tpk − 29 days) and 2013 January 1 (tpk + 90 days) in survey mode (15-150 keV energy range).”
• The rate, luminosity function and time delay of non-Collapsar short GRBs (2014, methodology): “…al. 2004) mission page.6 The 64-ms peak-flux of the bursts was estimated by correcting the 1 s peak-flux with the ratio of the 64-ms and 1024-ms peak-counts in the 64-ms binned light curve provided in Swift Burst GroundAnalysis Information page7 (Barthelmy et al. 2005; Sakamoto et al. 2008, 2011).”
• FERMI/LARGE AREA TELESCOPE DISCOVERY OF GAMMA-RAY EMISSION FROM A RELATIVISTIC JET IN THE NARROW-LINE QUASAR PMN J0948+0022 (2009, methodology): “For the screening, reduction and analysis of the data from the three instruments (BAT, Barthelmy et al. 2005; XRT, Burrows et al. 2005; UVOT, Roming et al. 2005) onboard the Swift satellite (Gehrels et al. 2004), we used the HEASoft v. 6.6.1 software package, together with the CALDB updated on 9…”
• THE 22 MONTH SWIFT-BAT ALL-SKY HARD X-RAY SURVEY (2009, neutral): “Swift-BAT is a wide field (∼2 sr) coded aperture instrument with the largest CdZnTe detector array ever fabricated (5243 cm2 consisting of 32,768 4mm detectors on a 4.2mm pitch) (Barthelmy et al. 2005).”
• The luminosity function and the rate of Swift's Gamma Ray Bursts (2009, methodology): “The peak-flux of each burst, measured in Swift’s BAT detectors band 15keV - 150keV (Barthelmy et al. 2005).”
• Signatures of magnetar central engines in short GRB light curves (2013, methodology): “For all the SGRBs, we analysed the BAT (Burst Alert Telescope; Barthelmy et al. 2005a) data by creating lightcurves using avariety of binning in signal-to-noise ratios and time looking for evidence of extended emission at the 3σ level where we consistently saw extended emission over more than 30 s…”
• Methods and results of an automatic analysis of a complete sample of Swift-XRT observations of GRBs (2008, background): “…however many other authors have confirmed that the steep decay phase is consistent with the expectation for high latitude emission (e.g. Tagliaferri et al. 2005; Barthelmy et al. 2005b; O’Brien et al. 2006; Goad et al. 2006; Liang et al. 2006; Willingale et al. 2007; Butler & Kocevski 2007b).”
• DISCERNING THE PHYSICAL ORIGINS OF COSMOLOGICAL GAMMA-RAY BURSTS BASED ON MULTIPLE OBSERVATIONAL CRITERIA: THE CASES OF z = 6.7 GRB 080913, z = 8.2 GRB 090423, AND SOME SHORT/HARD GRBs (2009, background): “…deep afterglow searches for a handful of short GRBs (Gehrels et al. 2005; Bloom et al. 2006; Fox et al. 2005; Villasenor et al. 2005; Hjorth et al. 2005a; Barthelmy et al. 2005a; Berger et al. 2005) suggest that some of them are associated with nearby earlytype galaxies with little star formation.”