Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope

The Fermi GST has already revolutionised our view of the high-energy universe.

In particular, the exciting results on dark matter (DM), gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and pulsars have shown how splendid the telescope is.

The results of the recent NASA Senior Review confirmed that and recognised Fermi’s continued importance in multi-messenger astronomy.

Though the Swedish community is relatively small we have been active in Fermi since its inception, contributing to hardware, calibration and data analysis.

Most recently we have concentrated our efforts in data monitoring, coordination of transient follow-up and development of analysis techniques.

This participation has been possible thanks to long-term support from the Swedish National Space Agency.This application is aimed at continued funding to allow Sweden to remain a member in the international Fermi collaboration, and projects to maximise the Swedish scientific return. Swedish scientists are mainly involved in studies of gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei and dark matter.

Our projects are therefore focused to support these areas, through development of event selection and data analysis techniques as well as data quality monitoring and improving transient follow-up.In the coming period, Fermi will continue to play a vital role in multi-messenger astronomy, such as the search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.

To meet these challenges, we are broadening the Swedish participation to also include the GBM instrument on-board Fermi.

This is the most prolific detector of gamma-ray bursts in orbit, and therefore highly relevant to follow-up studies of gravitational events.

As part of this renewal, we will help improve localization techniques, contribute to burst advocate shifts and develop techniques to perform highly time-resolved spectral analysis.A seperate application outlining our scientific projects, which will make use of this involvement in Fermi, will be submited to SNSA call 2021-R.