A Delta rocket carried NASA's Swift satellite into space from Cape Canaveral on 20 November 2004, lifting off at 12:16 pm local time. The craft was set to reach an orbit 600 kilometers above Earth roughly 80 minutes after launch.
The $250 million mission drew participation from Britain and Italy. Scientists expect it to advance understanding of black holes.
Gamma rays rank among the most energetic phenomena in the universe. Earth's atmosphere blocks them from reaching the surface, but in space they erupt from supernovae, the violent deaths of massive stars whose scattered remnants eventually seed new stars and planets.
A second source is intense bursts from deep space, detected only recently and still debated among astrophysicists. One leading theory holds they stem from collisions between neutron stars, the extraordinarily dense stellar remnants born from supernovae. When a neutron star's mass grows too great, it can collapse into a black hole.
NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, placed in orbit in 1991, had already established that the most powerful bursts originate outside our galaxy. The European Space Agency launched its own gamma-ray telescope, Integral, from Kazakhstan the previous October.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in November 2004, in its own words.