[en] AGILE has been providing continuous monitoring of the Galactic plane in its three years of operation. Thanks to its sensitivity at energies near 100MeV, AGILE has observed variability and transient behaviour in a number of sources. Simultaneous hard-X-ray coverage, rapid alerts to the astronomical community, and multiwavelength campaigns have provided identifications for some of these sources and placed constraints on others. Here it is provided an overview of these observations and their possible counterparts, including Microquasars and colliding wind binaries.

[en] AGILE is a Scientific Mission dedicated to high-energy astrophysics supported by ASI with scientific participation of INAF and INFN. The AGILE instrument is designed to simultaneously detect and image photons in the 30 MeV - 50 GeV and 15 - 45 keV energy bands with excellent imaging and timing capabilities, and a large field of view covering ∼ 1/5 of the entire sky at energies above 30 MeV. A CsI calorimeter is capable of GRB triggering in the energy band 0.3-50 MeV. The broadband detection of GRBs and the study of implications for particle acceleration and high energy emission are primary goals of th emission. AGILE can image GRBs with 2-3 arcminutes error boxes in the hard X-ray range, and provide broadband photon-by photon detection in the 15-45 keV, 03-50 MeV, and 30 MeV-30 GeV energy ranges. Microsecond on-board photon tagging and a ∼ 100 microsecond gamma-ray detection deadtime will be crucial for fast GRB timing. On-board calculated GRB coordinates and energy fluxes will be quickly transmitted to the ground by an ORBCOMM transceiver. AGILE have recently (December 2005) completed its gamma-ray calibration. It is now (January 2006) undergoing satellite integration and testing. The PLSV launch is planned in early 2006. AGILE is then foreseen to be fully operational during the summer of 2006. It will be the only mission entirely dedicated to high-energy astrophysics above 30 MeV during the period mid-2006/mid-2007

[en] The Minicalorimeter (MCAL) onboard the AGILE satellite is a 1400 cm² scintillation detector sensitive in the energy range 0.3-200 MeV. MCAL works both as a slave of the AGILE Silicon Tracker and as an autonomous detector for transient events (BURST mode). A dedicated onboard Burst Search logic scans BURST mode data in search of count rate increase. Peculiar characteristics of the detector are the high energy spectral coverage and a timing resolution of about 2 microseconds. Even if a trigger is not issued, BURST mode data are used to build a broad band energy spectrum (scientific ratemeters) organized in 11 bands for each of the two MCAL detection planes, with a time resolution of 1 second. After the first engineering commissioning phase, following the AGILE launch on 23rd April 2007, between 22nd June and 5th November 2007 eighteen GRBs were detected offline in the scientific ratemeters data, with a detection rate of about one per week. In this paper the capabilities of the detector will be described and an overview of the first detected GRBs will be given

[en] X-ray telescopes equipped with focusing optics in high eccentric orbit, as e.g. Newton-XMM and Chandra, showed a degradation of the detector performance and an important increase of the noise due to soft protons with energy between a few tens of keV and a few MeV, that are focused on the detector through the mirror module. It should be noted that the focusing of the protons by Wolter optics was an unexpected phenomenon. In Simbol-X a magnetic diverter will be implemented to deflect protons, in order to reduce the flux of charged particles impinging upon the focal plane. Obviously the design of the diverter should take into consideration the protons distribution at the exit of the mirror module; for this reason a detailed simulation about the interaction of particles with the mirror surface is necessary. Here we will present the scattering protons models currently under consideration, suggesting a preliminary solution for the design of the magnetic diverter. We will also discuss an ad hoc experiment to study this problem.

[en] The AGILE Mission will explore the gamma-ray Universe with a very innovative instrument combining for the first time a gamma-ray imager and a hard X-ray imager. AGILE will be operational at the beginning of 2007 and it will provide crucial data for the study of Active Galactic Nuclei, Gamma-Ray Bursts, unidentified gamma-ray sources, Galactic compact objects, supernova remnants, TeV sources, and fundamental physics by microsecond timing. The AGILE instrument is designed to simultaneously detect and image photons in the 30 MeV - 50 GeV and 15 - 45 keV energy bands with excellent imaging and timing capabilities, and a large field of view covering ∼ 1/5 of the entire sky at energies above 30 MeV. A CsI calorimeter is capable of GRB triggering in the energy band 0.3-50 MeV. The broadband detection of GRBs and the study of implications for particle acceleration and high energy emission are primary goals of the mission. AGILE can image GRBs with 2-3 arcminute error boxes in the hard X-ray range, and provide broadband photon-by photon detection in the 15-45 keV, 03-50 MeV, and 30 MeV-30 GeV energy ranges. Microsecond on-board photon tagging and a ∼ 100 microsecond gamma-ray detection deadtime will be crucial for fast GRB timing. On-board calculated GRB coordinates and energy fluxes will be quickly transmitted to the ground by an ORBCOMM transceiver. AGILE is now (January 2007) undergoing final satellite integration and testing. The PLS V launch is planned in spring 2007. AGILE is then foreseen to be fully operational during the summer of 2007

[en] AGILE is an ASI (Italian Space Agency) Small Space Mission for high energy astrophysics in the range 30 MeV - 50 GeV. The AGILE satellite is currently in the C phase and is planned to be launched in 2005. The Payload shall consist of a Tungsten-Silicon Tracker, a CsI Minicalorimeter, an anticoincidence system and a X-Ray detector sensitive in the 10-40 KeV range. The purpose of the Minicalorimeter (MCAL) is twofold. It shall work in conjunction with the Tracker in order to evaluate the energy of the interacting photons, and it shall operate autonomously in the energy range 250KeV-250 MeV for detection of transients and gamma ray burst events and for the measurement of gamma ray background fluctuations. We present the architecture of the Test Equipment we have designed and developed in order to test and verify the MCAL Simplified Electrical Model prototype which has been manufactured in order to validate the design of the MCAL Proto Flight Model

[en] AGILE will explore the gamma-ray Universe with a very innovative instrument combining for the first time a gamma-ray imager and a hard X-ray imager. AGILE will be operational in spring 2007 and it will provide crucial data for the study of Active Galactic Nuclei, Gamma-Ray Bursts, unidentified gamma-ray sources. Galactic compact objects, supernova remnants, TeV sources, and fundamental physics by microsecond timing. The AGILE instrument is designed to simultaneously detect and image photons in the 30 MeV - 50 GeV and 15 - 45 keV energy bands with excellent imaging and timing capabilities, and a large field of view covering ∼ 1/5 of the entire sky at energies above 30 MeV. A CsI calorimeter is capable of GRB triggering in the energy band 0.3-50 MeV AGILE is now (March 2007) undergoing launcher integration and testing. The PLSV launch is planned in spring 2007. AGILE is then foreseen to be fully operational during the summer of 2007

[en] AGILE, the Italian space mission dedicated to gamma-ray and hard-X astrophysics, was successfully launched on 23rd April 2007 and is currently fully operative. The Mini-Calorimeter (MCAL) on-board the AGILE satellite is a scintillation detector made of 20 kg of segmented CsI(Tl) scintillator with photodiode readout with a total geometrical area of 1400 cm². MCAL can work both as a slave of the AGILE Silicon tracker and as an independent detector for gamma-ray bursts (GRB) detection in the 300 keV - 100 MeV energy range. Despite its limited thickness, due to weight constraints, MCAL has proven to successfully self-trigger GRBs at MeV energies providing photon-by-photon data with less than 2 μs time resolution and almost all-sky detection capabilities. The instrument design and characteristics, as well as the in-flight performance after one year of operation in space and the scientific results obtained so far are reviewed and discussed.

[en] Terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) are very short bursts of high-energy photons and electrons originating in Earth's atmosphere. We present here a localization study of TGFs carried out at gamma-ray energies above 20 MeV based on an innovative event selection method. We use the AGILE satellite Silicon Tracker data that for the first time have been correlated with TGFs detected by the AGILE Mini-Calorimeter. We detect 8 TGFs with gamma-ray photons of energies above 20 MeV localized by the AGILE gamma-ray imager with an accuracy of ∼5-10 deg. at 50 MeV. Remarkably, all TGF-associated gamma rays are compatible with a terrestrial production site closer to the subsatellite point than 400 km. Considering that our gamma rays reach the AGILE satellite at 540 km altitude with limited scattering or attenuation, our measurements provide the first precise direct localization of TGFs from space.

[en] The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next-generation atmospheric Cherenkov gamma-ray observatory. The Observation Execution System (OES) team within the CTA project is designing and prototyping the software to execute the observations and to handle the acquisition of scientific data at GB/s rates. In this contribution we show the OES system as it is being designed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Systems Modeling (SysML) formalisms. In addition, we present the status of the associated prototyping activities. (paper)