Stanford, California

Physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) are hoping to secure a vital new line of business for their laboratory next week, when the US space agency NASA is expected to announce plans for a satellite to succeed the defunct Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

NASA will choose between rival proposals from SLAC and from its own Marshall Space Flight Centre at Huntsville, Alabama, and Washington University, St Louis, to build the main instrument for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), due to be launched in 2005. “We're expecting that we'll win,” says Jonathan Dorfan, SLAC's director.

SLAC's confidence is partly based on the enthusiasm professed by Dan Goldin, the administrator of NASA, for using detector technologies developed by high-energy physicists in space.

Under SLAC's proposal, NASA, the Department of Energy and a group of overseas collaborators would each carry a third of the $120 million cost of a GLAST instrument that would use thin silicon solid-state detectors to track gamma-ray bursts. NASA would pay an additional $200 million to launch the spacecraft.

The project would “bring the culture of high-energy physics to work with NASA on an instrument designed and built by scientists”, says David Leith, former head of the research division at SLAC. The detector would be a hundred times as sensitive as the EGRET instrument carried by the Compton observatory. The rival proposal from the Marshall Space Flight Center would use fibre-optics technology to detect the gamma-ray signals.