National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The HETE-2 Satellite

HETE-2, also known as the High Energy Transient Explorer was an international collaboration between USA, Japan, France, and Italy, headed by the Center for Space Research at MIT. It was successully launched with a Pegasus launcher, on October 9 2000 from the Kwajalein missile range facility, an atoll in the Pacific ocean.

HETE-2 was designed to detect and localize gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The suite of instruments onboard allowed simultaneous observations of GRBs to be made in soft and medium X-ray and gamma-ray energies. HETE-2 computed the location of the GRB and transmitted the coordinates as soon as they were calculated. These coordinates were quickly distributed to ground-based observers to allow detailed studies of the initial phases of GRBs. HETE-2 also performed a survey of the X-ray sky.

Mission Characteristics

Lifetime

Energy Range

Payload

• Two X-ray detectors:
  
  • Soft X-ray Camera (SXC; 0.5-14 keV).
    Two CCD-based one-dimensional coded-aperature X-ray imagers, one along spacecraft X-direction, the other parallel to Y-direction. Eff. area 7.4 cm² per SXC. FOV ~0.9 sr. Spatial resolution less than 30". Spectral resolution 46 eV @ 525 eV, 129 eV @ 5.9 keV.
    
  • Wide Field X-ray Monitor (WXM; 2-25 keV).
    Two coded-mask one-dimensional position sensitive X-ray detectors oriented orthogonally to each other to measure X and Y positions independently. Eff. area 175 cm² each. Spatial resolution less than 10´.Spectral Resolution ~22% @ 8 keV.
    
• French Gamma-ray Telescope (FREGATE; 6-400 keV).
  4 NaI(Tl) gamma-ray detectors. Eff. area 120 cm². FOV ~3 sr. Spectral resolution ~25% @ 20 keV, ~9% @ 662 keV.

Archive: HEASARC hosts the FREGATE GRB lightcurves and raw telemetry data.