1 Introduction

GRB 980703 was detected on July 3.182 UT with the All Sky Monitor (ASM) on the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE; Levine et al. 1998), the Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE, trigger No. 6891; Kippen et al. 1998), BeppoSAX (Amati et al. 1998) and Ulysses (Hurley et al. 1998).