The mission of Agile, the satellite of the Italian Space Agency to hunt for the most energetic cosmic sources in the Universe, which emit gamma and production of 160 scientific publications and among the many discoveries the presence of a sort of particle accelerator inside the Crab Nebula and the emission of particles from near the black hole Cygnus X-3.
“AGILE can be considered a record-breaking mission not only for the duration of almost 17 years in orbit, but also for the important scientific results obtained,” said Teodoro Valente, president of ASI.
Created by ASI with the support of the National Institute of Astrophysics, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, universities and Italian industry, with OHB Italia, Thales Alenia Space, Rheinmetall and Telespazio, in over 87,200 orbits around the Earth, Agile – acronym for Lightweight Gamma-Imaging Astrodetector – monitored the sky at high energies, observing a large variety of galactic and extra-galactic gamma-ray sources from neutron stars, remnants of supernova explosions and black holes.
In recent years, the observations acquired by the satellite have been received on the ground by the ASI Luigi Broglio Space Center station in Malindi, Kenya, and the data have then been retransmitted to the Telespazio control centre, before arriving at the ASI Space Science Data Center in Rome, responsible for all scientific operations.
“Agile has given us many surprises and first-rate scientific discoveries, the result of the ingenuity and enormous work of all those who saw it first grow and then launched into orbit,” said Marco Tavani, president of Inaf.
In total over 160 publications and important discoveries related to cosmic sources of high energy as well as a detailed map of the entire Galaxy.
“We are proud to have contributed to the heart of this success – said Antonio Zoccoli, president of the Infn – with the silicon-tungsten tracer of the Gamma Ray Imaging Detector, the heart, in fact, of the main Agile detector”.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA