GLAST and the future of high energy gamma-ray astrophysics

. The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is a mission that is being built by an international collaboration with contributions from space agencies, high-energy particle physics institutes, and universities in France, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States to measure the cosmic gamma-ray flux in the energy range 20 MeV to 300 GeV, with supporting measurements for gamma-ray bursts from 10 keV to 25 MeV. With its launch in early 2008, GLAST will open a new and important window on a wide variety of high energy phenomena, including black holes and active galactic nuclei; gamma-ray bursts; the origin of cosmic rays and supernova remnants; and searches for hypothetical new phenomena such as supersymmetric dark matter annihilations, Lorentz invariance violation, and exotic relics from the Big Bang.