This is the archive of all the GCN/NEAR Notices and Light Curves in their original form as they were sent out to the GCN sites. The light curves are available in Postscript, JPEG, and Text formats.
The light curves are the count rate in the BGO Shield of the X-ray Gamma-ray Spectrometer (XGRS) instrument in the 0.1-1 MeV bandpass. The time sampling is 1-sec bins. The telemetry data from NEAR is available in 1-25 hours after the trigger time. Automated software within the GCN system captures these daily dumps, scans for triggers, extracts the rate information, and produces the light curves.
WARNING: Because the XGRS instrument is not operating with a 100%
duty cycle (mission ops turns off the instrument for stretches lasting
hours to days), the absence of a trigger date/time in this list can NOT
be used as indication that NEAR-XDGR did not or could not detect that
particular transient. Note that as the mission gets closer to EROS, the
duty cycle of the XGRS instrument will increase significantly.
As of 12 Jan 00 the NEAR mission went into 100% duty-cycle operations
(because of apprach and orbit around EROS). The telemetry downlinks switched
from 3 times a week to once every day.
WARNING: At this point there is no identification of the trigger type. Most light curves are for actual GRBs, but like BATSE there are other non-astrophysical mechanisms which can cause count-rate increases in the detector and initiate a trigger.
Please note that because of spacecraft telemetry downlink operations, about 1 in 10 triggers are downloaded twice. Hense, since the automated scripts are not smart enough to recognize this duplication, there will be a few duplicated entries in the table below. On rare occasions a human will remove these duplicate entries. Also, the downlink operations tends to playback the data in reverse chronological order, hense the triggers tend to be in reverse order within a given day.
For more information on the GCN/NEAR program. For more information on NEAR (HEASARC).
