The off-line Quest

The off-line GRB quest has been applied to the GRBM archive data. The first obvious consequence is that for all the bursts discovered within data from old observations, there is no possibility of follows up at other wavelengths. On the other hand, the quest of both on-board triggered and non-triggered bursts is of key importance to study the properties of the GRB population detected with the GRBM, and to test the localization technique already described in section . In the following sections, the pieces of information automatically extracted, concerning each burst candidate are described.

As far as the search algorithms are concerned (described in chapter 3), an important difference between the on- and off-line quests is worth mentioning: while the on-line search applies only to 1 s bins, in the off-line case the search is perfomed with different rebin times: 1, 2, 4 and 8 s bins, respectively. On one hand, this improved the search sensitivity, but, on the other hand, it increased the number of false off-line triggers, thus lowering the quest reliability. In the off-line case, this has allowed to catch many faint bursts, at the cost of making the visual inspection heavier, as many more candidates had to be checked. Just because of this reason, the on-line quest has been applying only to 1 s light curves, since, in this case, a greater number of false off-line triggers automatically detected could not be controlled by human intervention.