The Interplanetary GRB Network: A Status Report

Interplanetary spacecraft have been used with orbiting satellites to precisely localize gamma ray transients for nearly 25 years, making possible both early GRB and SGR discoveries and enabling a number of recent GRB-associated afterglow observations. This technique was pursued by the creative modifications of experiments generally planned with other goals, an existential mode at best. The latest achievement is the NEAR in-flight software change that, on its way to the asteroid Eros and complementing the distant Ulysses, made possible the present fully long-baseline, 3-vertex interplanetary network (IPN). We outline the status and ongoing contributions of this IPN, now that Compton-GRO is gone and that BeppoSAX and HETE-2 are active, and discuss future capabilities when INTEGRAL, Mars 2001, AGILE, Swift, GLAST and the ISS may be involved.