2 Renewal

The recent modification of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) for continuous gamma-ray monitoring makes possible the renewal of a burst network with a geometry having three widely separated vertices, required for precise source definition. In an interplanetary trajectory to the asteroid Eros, now over 2 AU from the Earth, NEAR completes the network that includes Ulysses, at up to 6 AU, and all the near-Earth burst monitors involved in the GCN (in particular, Konus, on GGS-Wind, at a distance varying up to 5 light-seconds, and the orbiting detectors on Compton-GRO, Rossi-XTE and BeppoSAX). Missions not in Earth orbit generally download data on a daily to several-day basis, but some fraction of the bursts from any preceding day can be, of course, only several hours old. In addition, it is planned that when NEAR uses its low bit-rate mode (when bursts would otherwize be less often recovered), a revision in the spacecraft software will enable prioritized storage and downloading for preselected events. Thus, combined with the GCN, the renewed IPN may provide a number of globally distributed GRB alerts of adequate rapidity and precision to be useful for optical afterglow searches, and an added number with modest delays, adequate for radio astronomical searches.