TITLE: GCN GRB OBSERVATION REPORT NUMBER: 1299 SUBJECT: GRB020322: Candidate Optical Afterglow DATE: 02/03/23 16:02:37 GMT FROM: Don Lamb at U.Chicago R. J. McMillan, D. Q. Lamb, and D. G. York, Report: We have obtained one 10-minute exposure in r' and three 10-minute exposures in i' of the Beppo-SAX NFI error-box (Gandolfi, GCN 1291) for GRB020322 (Piro, GCN 1290) using SPIcam on the ARC 3.5-meter telescope at APO beginning at UTC 9:44 on 2002 March 23. We estimate the magnitude of object b (Bloom et al., GCN 1296) in our images to be r*=24.5+/-0.7 and i*=24.0+/-0.7. We find that object b is now as faint as or fainter than object c (Bloom et al., GCN 1296, Greiner et al., GCN 1298) in both r* and i*. We therefore confirm that the object has faded (Greiner et al., GCN 1298) and is likely to be the optical afterglow of GRB020322. This message is citable.