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Abstract:
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The Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard the GLAST satellite (to be launched Fall 2007) will survey the sky at very high photon energies, from 30 MeV to over 300 GeV. At these energies, conventional telescope mirror and detector technology cannot be used, and the directions and energies of incident photons are reconstructed by examining the properties of the particle showers produced in the LAT detectors. As a result, the blurring of the LAT is highly energy-dependent, with angular resolution going roughly as 1/E, and at low energies (< 200MeV), the point-spread function has an angular scale of a few degrees, with large non-Gaussian tails. This presents a severe source identification and image reconstruction challenge as we expect to observe many astronomical point sources clustered on scales smaller than this and extended sources that have structure on these angular scales and smaller.
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