PHEBUS is a Payload for High Energy BUrst Spectroscopy onboard the GRANAT
observatory. There are 6 crystals of bismuth germanate 78 mm in diameter
and 120 mm long each which are placed on different sides of the spacecraft.
These detectors work in the hardest energy range among all the instruments
of GRANAT - from ~0.1 MeV up to ~100 MeV (SIGMA telescope is only sensitive
up to 1.3 MeV). However, PHEBUS does not provide the information on the
direction of incident photons and its possibility to localize the sources of
gamma-ray bursts is much lower than that of telescopes with coded mask,
devices with rotating collimators (such as WATCH) and BATSE experiment.
Instead PHEBUS supercedes all of these devices in its spectroscopic
possibilities. None of the instruments above has an energy range which
covers three decades of wavelenghts. That allows for PHEBUS to investigate
spectral behaviour of dozens of GRB's as well as their evolution with time.
Three brightest bursts observed by PHEBUS
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