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 the capability requires a hardware trigger and onboard software event filters that are robust and highly efficient for gamma rays while remaining powerful rejecters of the much larger fluxes of charged-particle backgrounds. Because of the important discovery windows for science and the uncertainties in the background fluxes, configuration flexibility is a particularly important system feature. This paper describes the purposes and architecture of the system, the components and capabilities of the hardware trigger and onboard software filters, and the on-orbit operations plan and expected performance