Michael Braukus Headquarters, Washington, D.C. September 23, 1991 (Phone: 202/453-1549) Embargoed Until 11 a.m. EDT John Loughlin II Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (Phone: 301/286-5565) RELEASE: 91-151 NASA RENAMES GAMMA RAY OBSERVATORY IN HONOR OF COMPTON NASA announced today that the Gamma Ray Observatory, deployed April 7, 1991, from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, will be renamed in honor of Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Arthur Holly Compton. The new official name of the 17-ton orbiting spacecraft is the Arthur Holly Compton Gamma Ray Observatory or Compton Observatory. Currently in an orbit of 273 x 280 statute miles, the Compton Observatory was designed to study gamma rays, an invisible, high-energy form of radiation. Its instrumentation is used by scientists to study gamma-ray sources such as cosmic gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, supernovae, pulsars, black holes and quasars. Dr. Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962) was the American physicist whose ground-breaking series of experiments on the interaction of high-energy radiation and matter demonstrated the wave/particle duality of nature. His findings played a key role in the development of modern physics. In the late 1930s, Compton conducted comprehensive studies of cosmic rays. Interactions of cosmic rays with interstellar gas are an important source of the gamma rays that the Compton Observatory is studying. Compton's work provided significant clues to our present understanding of many of the basic physical processes that create gamma radiation. - more - - 2 - The Compton Observatory is the second of four planned spacecraft in NASAs Great Observatories program, including the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility and the Space Infrared Telescope Facility. The Compton Observatory is managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. for NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications. - end -