REDONDO BEACH, Calif., April 9 – TRW has been awarded a six-month study contract by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to refine its development concept for NASA's Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), a successor to the TRW-built Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (Compton GRO). The contract effectively places TRW in the "finals" of the competition slated to select NASA's GLAST mission prime contractor in spring 2002. Scheduled for launch in 2005, GLAST will study celestial phenomena that produce gamma rays, the most energetic form of radiation. "This contract builds on TRW's previous GLAST studies and our experience as the spacecraft producer and integrator of some of NASA's most successful science missions, including Compton GRO and more recently, NASA's Chandra x-ray Observatory," said Fred Ricker, vice president and general manager of TRW Space & Laser Programs Division. "We're committed to making GLAST equally successful, both as a science mission and as a validation of NASA's Rapid II Spacecraft Catalog approach."