About the Swift Mission Operations Center

The Swift Mission Operations Center (MOC), located at Penn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, is responsible for operating and controlling the satellite and for receiving and distributing data from Swift about gamma-ray bursts. MOC scientists also are responsible for planning Swift observations, for commanding and uploading software to the satellite, for verifying the health and safety of the satellite and its instruments, and for quickly reviewing the gamma-ray-burst data as it arrives.

The MOC receives almost all of Swift's data—in the range of six thousand million bytes per day—via a transmission station in Kenya maintained by the Italian Space Agency. A small portion of Swift's data—about fifty thousand bytes per day—is delivered via TDRSS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) simultaneously to the MOC at Penn State and to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which shares the data with astronomers worldwide through Swift's gamma-ray-burst coordinates network (GCN).

The Penn State team at the MOC also built and tested Swift's X-ray and UV/optical telescopes, along with the Swift partners at the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in England and the Brera Observatory in Italy.