High Energy Transient Explorer-2

High Energy Transient Explorer-2 (HETE-2), international satellite designed to study gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), intense flashes of gamma rays from very distant objects. HETE-2 was launched on October 9, 2000, near Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean by a Pegasus launch vehicle dropped from the bottom of an airplane. (In 1996 a previous satellite had failed to separate from the Pegasus’s third stage and was thus unable to open its solar panels. Construction started on its replacement, HETE-2, shortly thereafter.) HETE-2 was a collaboration between institutions in the United States, Japan, France, Italy, Brazil, and India. The HETE-2 mission ended in 2007.

HETE-2 carried detectors that were sensitive to X-rays and gamma rays with energies ranging from 1 to 500 keV (1 keV = 1,000 electron volts). Those detectors could pinpoint the location of a GRB to within 10 minutes of arc in less than two minutes so astronomers on Earth could perform follow-up observations. (Some GRBs that were detected with X-rays could have their locations determined to within 10 seconds of arc.) HETE-2 always pointed away from the Sun, which meant that any GRBs that it detected were visible at night by ground-based telescopes. Its detectors could observe a wide area; HETE-2 covered about 60 percent of the sky each year.

HETE-2 observed more than 300 GRBs. One of these objects, GRB 030329, was the first GRB to be definitely associated with a supernova on the basis of the similarities between the spectrum of its optical afterglow and that of Type Ic supernovae. HETE also found that GRBs have evolved over the history of the universe, early GRBs being much brighter than those that occurred later.