The Trigger And Onboard Filter of the GLAST Large Area Telescope

The GLAST Large Area Telescope (LAT) will measure the cosmic gamma-ray flux in the energy range 20 MeV to >300 GeV. The LAT will open a new and important window on a wide variety of high-energy phenomena. Achieving this capability requires a hardware trigger and onboard software event filters that are robust and highly efficient for gamma rays while keeping the event rates due to the much larger fluxes of charged particle backgrounds at an acceptable level. Because of the important discovery windows for science and the uncertainties in the background fluxes, configuration flexibility is a particularly important system feature. This poster describes the purposes and architecture of the system, the components and capabilities of the hardware trigger and onboard software filters, testing and operation experience on the ground, and the on-orbit operations plan and expected performance