Personal tools
Log in

Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

INAF

Istituto italiano di astrofisica - national institute for astrophisics

Ciao
You are here: Home INAF News Fifty thousand orbits for AGILE, the all-Italian satellite

Fifty thousand orbits for AGILE, the all-Italian satellite

On 19 December 2016, at 06:08:53 UTC (+1 in Italy), a few months after celebrating its ten years in orbit, the AGILE satellite reached the significant milestone of 50 thousand orbits around the Earth since the day of its launch, 23 April 2007.

The all-Italian satellite, AGILE, developed by ASI in collaboration with INAFINFN and CIFS and the Italian industries CGS, Thales-Alenia Space and Telespaziois devoted to high energy astrophysics and is able to detect high-energy terrestrial phenomena, such as super Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs), which occur in the equatorial regions.

AGILE is currently at the forefront in the search for any electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.

The small satellite, initially designed to have an operational lifetime of only two years, highly efficiently continues its mission of exploring the gamma-ray Universe and has celebrated its 50 thousand orbits at about 500 km above the ASI spaceport in Malindi, Kenya, by observing an extraordinary event of extragalactic origin: two almost simultaneous spectacular gamma-ray flares from two massive black holes located in the centre of two distant active galactic nuclei, CTA 102and 3C454.3.

CTA 102, in particular, in these days has been the brightest source in the whole gamma-ray sky, even brighter than much closer sources within our galaxy like the Vela pulsar.

The AGILE data, collected at ASI spaceport in Malindi, are readily acquired, processed and managed by SSDC/ASDC, the ASI multi-mission centre, sent to the alert system developed by the PI Team of INAF in Bologna, and analyzed daily by the researchers of the AGILEteam at various INAF institutes and at ASDC.

Source: ResearchItaly

Filed under: ,

FIRST IMAGE OF A REGION OF THE MILKY WAY FROM THE PEGASUS SURVEY

Jan 16, 2023

FIRST IMAGE OF A REGION OF THE MILKY WAY FROM THE PEGASUS SURVEY Led by INAF and Macquarie University, a portion of our Galaxy has been imaged in great detail as part of the PEGASUS survey - a radio astronomy project designed to discover more about the Milky Way

Studying the birth of exoplanets with chemistry

Sep 23, 2022

Studying the birth of exoplanets with chemistry A new study led by Elenia Pacetti, PhD student at La Sapienza University and INAF, jointly uses ultra-volatile, volatile, and refractory elements in the atmospheres of giant planets to develop a unified method to shed light on how and where giant planets form. The new work, published in The Astrophysical Journal, paves the road to the exoplanetary studies of the ESA mission Ariel