The Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) is a multi-telescope experiment designed to observe the optical afterglow of gamma-ray bursts. The experiment currently consists of four telescopes located in

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

, Namibia, Turkey, and at the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas. The Namibian telescope is located at the High Energy Stereoscopic System site in the

Gamsberg The Gamsberg is a mountain in the Appenzell Alps, overlooking the region of Walenstadt in the canton of St. Gallen. Located in the Alvier group it is the culminating point of the range lying between Lake Walenstadt and Toggenburg. The summit ...

mountains south-west of the capital Windhoek. The ROTSE project is a collaboration of astrophysicists from the University of Michigan, Los Alamos National Laboratory,

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

, the University of New South Wales (Australia) and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (Germany). The original ROTSE-I had 4 telephoto lenses of 11 cm aperture, covering a 16x16 degree field of view. This detected the first afterglow of a GRB while the burst was still ongoing, but this was the only burst detected by ROTSE or the very similar

Livermore Optical Transient Imaging System The Livermore Optical Transient Imaging System, or LOTIS, is an automated telescope designed to slew very rapidly to the location of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), to enable the simultaneous measurement of optical counterparts. Since GRBs can occur anyw ...

. Therefore, ROTSE-II was designed, also featuring a large field of view, but it was never built, since new satellites such as

HETE-2 High Energy Transient Explorer 2 (HETE-2; also known as Explorer 79) was a NASA astronomical satellite with international participation (mainly Japan and France). The satellite bus for the first HETE-1 was designed and built by AeroAstro, Inc. ...

and SWIFT could provide smaller error boxes, making a huge field of view unnecessary. This led to the design of ROTSE-III, a more or less conventional telescope designed for fast slewing and operation at multiple locations around the world.

References

External links

ROTSE homepage
Astronomical observatories in Texas Astronomical observatories in Turkey Astronomical observatories in Namibia Astronomical observatories in New South Wales Astronomical observatories in the United States Optical telescopes University of Michigan {{Observatory-stub

See also

References

External links