Burstman: A Portable Grb Detector For Really Long Voyages

The renewal of the Ulysses mission to the year 2001, and the failure of Mars Observer, once more leave the Interplanetary Network with only two widely spaced components. We have therefore developed and begun to build a small GRB detector for the Russian Mars '96 mission. The first flight unit has now been delivered to Russia for spacecraft tests. Three interesting features of this experiment are first, that it measures both particles and gamma rays, second, that it is not much larger than a Walkman (hence the name), and third, that it is being constructed with support only from discretionary funds at a number of institutes. We discuss the types of measurements that Burstman will make, as well as the quantity and quality of the small error boxes that will be obtained during the two year (nominal) Mars '96 mission.