The Republic has a very active space programme but few people know about it. Irish scientists and companies have been involved in most of the major satellite launches sent aloft by the European Space Agency (ESA) and next year sees the latest, the INTEGRAL mission.
INTEGRAL is the International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory. Set for launch in mid-October, 2002, the satellite will search the far reaches of the universe for gamma ray sources, the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This country has played a major part in the project via University College, Dublin, and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Investigators from these two institutions helped develop the Optical Monitoring Camera (OMC), which is one of the key instruments to be flown on INTEGRAL.
The Minister of State for Science, Technology and Commerce, Noel Treacy, joined with ESA's director of science, Prof David Southwood, last week to celebrate and publicise the Republic's involvement in the mission. A group of scientists who assembled at the Royal Irish Academy heard about the mission from the two local co-investigators, Prof Brian McBreen of UCD's department of experimental physics and Prof Evert Meurs, director of Dunsink Observatory.
The Republic has been a member of ESA since 1980 and since then, 340 Irish firms have won contracts and participated in the development of satellites and the Ariane family of rockets. Being selected to put an instrument on to an ESA mission was open to international competition, he said. "And it is a tribute to the reputation of our researchers at both UCD and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies that they were selected to share in this important scientific project," Mr Treacy said.
Prof Southwood said work started in 1992 but those behind the project had been involved for 15 years or more. Prof McBreen was one of the founding fathers of the project in the 1980s that led to INTEGRAL.
ESA's involvement in space science was important as a "strategic asset" for European science and for "technological independence", he said. It was also valuable as a way to protect Europe's cultural identity and to provide opportunities for scientific education. "This is something that does inspire our young people. It should inspire everybody."
The satellite has been assembled and is currently undergoing environmental tests at ESA's research centre in the Netherlands. It will be launched in October, 2002, on a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonour space centre in Kazazkhstan.
Its mission will be to gather gamma rays in energies from 15,000 electron volts to 10 million electron volts, explained Prof McBreen. INTEGRAL will carry a high-resolution spectrograph, an x-ray measuring device and the OMC, a device developed by the Irish teams in collaboration with scientists from Spain, Belgium and Britain.
Prof Meurs described the OMC and its "very complex" series of lenses that will focus light on to an array of sensitive charge-coupled devices which can capture data and relay it in picture form. It will be used in conjunction with the spectrograph to look at distant gamma ray sources, some of which are linked to the most spectacular and energetic events in the universe: gamma ray bursts.
These are unimaginably powerful events that last for just 10 to 15 seconds but during which a burst becomes the single brightest object in the universe, explained Prof McBreen.
They are thought to be caused by the collapse of very large stars dozens of times bigger than our sun, which become black holes. As a collapse begins, mass equivalent to that contained in our sun can condense into the black hole each second, reaching a peak of energy in the last few seconds of the star's death.
This throws out twin jets of tremendously powerful gamma rays that cross the universe. The bursts also emit more visible light than that given off by entire galaxies.
The spectrograph on board INTEGRAL will measure the gamma ray energies and provide data about their source. And the OMC will capture images even as a gamma ray burst reaches its peak, providing the highest resolution images yet available of these dramatic events.