High Energy Transient Explorer
High Energy Transient Explorer

HETE-2, also known as the High Energy Transient Explorer was an international collaboration between USA, Japan, France, and Italy, headed by the Center for Space Research at MIT. It was successfully launched with a Pegasus launcher, on October 9 2000 from the Kwajalein missile range facility, an atoll in the Pacific oceon. HETE-2 was designed to detect and localize gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The suite of instruments onboard allowed simultaneous observations of GRBs to be made in soft and medium X-ray and gamma-ray energies. HETE-2 computed the location of the GRB and transmitted the coordinates as soon as they were calculated. These coordinates were quickly distributed to ground-based observers to allow detailed studies of the initial phases of GRBs. HETE-2 also performed a survey of the X-ray sky.