The PTR Group, Inc. unveiled that one of the space-based science instruments it helped develop, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) was successfully launched on June 11, 2008 from NASA's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida onboard the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) spacecraft. The spacecraft was placed into orbit via a Delta II "Heavy" rocket.

    With the advent of Operationally Responsive Space and the development of tactical satellites, comes the issue of providing access to those assets to the warfighter. The PTR Group, working with the US Naval Research Lab (NRL) and the Office of Force Transformation, has developed the Virtual Mission Operation Center (VMOC). VMOC provides a rigorous interface for tactical users to generate satellite tasking. Using PTR’s knowledge of satellites and satellite systems, PTR engineers have developed an autonomous system for satellite tasking. Using satellite telemetry, ephemeris and a defined rule-set, the VMOC matches a users tasking request with satellite/sensor availability to create satellite command loads.

    The PTR Group is a significant contributor to the LAT instrument, working with the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, and the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, CA. GLAST is a next generation high-energy gamma-ray observatory that employs two instruments to observe celestial gamma-ray sources. The primary instrument is the Large Area Telescope, which detects gamma rays with energies of 20 million electron volts to greater than 300 billion electron volts.

    The secondary instrument is the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM), which observes gamma ray bursts within its 2/3 sky field-of-view. The PTR Group is the embedded systems specialist responsible for the LAT start-up code and the instrument management software that controls its state during science operations. As experts in the area of VxWorks flight software development, the PTR Group worked closely with software developers at NRL and SLAC to develop, test, and integrate this flight software.

    "The PTR Group is very pleased to be a part of this scientific endeavor. We hope our embedded software efforts will contribute to the overall success of the GLAST mission and the resultant science from the data produced by the instruments onboard," noted Todd Brackett, company President/CEO.