Scientific Performance of a Nano-satellite MeV Telescope

Abstract

Over the past two decades, both X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy have experienced great progress. However, the region of the electromagnetic spectrum around ∼1 MeV is not so thoroughly explored. Future medium-sized gamma-ray telescopes will fill this gap in observations. As the timescale for the development and launch of a medium-class mission is ∼10 years, with substantial costs, we propose a different approach for the immediate future. In this paper, we evaluate the viability of a much smaller and cheaper detector: a nano-satellite Compton telescope, based on the CubeSat architecture. The scientific performance of this telescope would be well below that of the instrument expected for the future larger missions; however, via simulations, we estimate that such a compact telescope will achieve a performance similar to that of COMPTEL.

Sensitivity to Gamma-Ray Bursts of a Nanosatellite MeV Telescope with a Silicon Tracker

“…With respect to the preliminary instrument described in Lucchetta et al (2017) we simplified the calorimeter design, making the bottom calorimeter thinner and replicating the design on the four sides, as shown in Figure 1. The main reason for this simplification stems from the fact that the detector was poorly performing in the pair-production regime, so we opted to design a purely Compton detector.…”

“…1. A background simulation is performed, including secondary photons from Earth and extragalactic isotropic emission, as described in Lucchetta et al (2017) and above. The simulated time interval is divided in time bands of increasing width, from 0.125s to 64s.…”

“…We proposed a ∼1 liter nanosatellite instrument as a pathfinder, based on the same Si tracker technology, arguing that it is also a valuable scientific instrument on its own account (Lucchetta et al 2017). Remarkably, nanoscale satellites are being proposed as valuable detectors of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in the X-ray and gamma-ray bands, see, e.g., Chattopadhyay et al (2018), Perkins et al (2018), and Fiore et al (2018), among many others.…”

“…In this paper we present an update on the design in Lucchetta et al (2017) and estimate its performance for the observation of GRBs.…”

Feasibility of Observing Gamma-ray Polarization from Cygnus X-1 Using a CubeSat

“…CubeSats have been utilized in many different fields, including astronomy and astrophysics (Shkolnik 2018). An MeV telescope on a CubeSat has also been discussed in the literature (Lucchetta et al 2017;Rando et al 2019).…”