1 History

The BeppoSAX mission has provided the missing link connecting gamma ray bursts to their cosmological sources. The discovery of the long-lived soft X-ray component of GRBs assisted in enabling the further discovery of the GRB-associated optical and radio afterglows. Essential to this process was the several-hour rapidity of BeppoSAX's GRB source notification. Long ago in the 1970s, the first IPN had been successfully defining source locations of GRBs to arc-minute accuracies, but the data processing times and the distributions then suffered considerable and unavoidable delays. Following the end of the first IPN in the 1980s, there were years of IPN catastrophes, such as the cancellation of Solar Polar, the failure of the Mars Observer at Mars, the failure of Mars 96 at launch, and the apparent unavailability of several other missions for GRB monitors or piggybacks.