Speaker
Description
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which turns 20 years old in November 2024, is an epochal mission for TDAMM science thanks to it's rapid response capabilities, allowing for fast turn around observation of transients both discovered by Swift itself, and other observatories. It's combination of sensitive X-ray and UV/Optical telescopes allows for broadband follow-up of events discovered by MAXI and others. Before MAXI launched, it was recognized that Swift and MAXI are strongly complementary missions, and the two teams agreed to collaborate on transient discovery. This began a 15 year long collaboration between the two teams in which transients discovered by MAXI were regularly observed by Swift in order to accurately localize, categorize and follow-up these new events, which has resulted in ~100 publications on joint results from Swift and MAXI. In this talk I give a history of this collaboration and talk about selected scientific about highlights of this collaboration, including most recently the co-detection of GRB 221009A, AKA "The BOAT", the brightest Gamma-Ray burst ever seen and observations of GW events by Swift and MAXI. Finally I talk about the future of the collaboration, demonstrating new capabilities that Swift plans to bring online in the next 12 months which can further complement MAXI's discovery potential.
