The Scientific Performance of the The Moon Burst Energetics All-sky Monitor (MoonBEAM)

Abstract

MoonBEAM is a SmallSat concept placed in cislunar orbit developed to study the progenitors and multimessenger/multiwavelength signals of transient relativistic jets and outflows and determine the conditions that lead to the launching of a transient relativistic jet. The advantage of Moon-BEAM is the instantaneous all-sky coverage due to its orbit, which maximizes the gamma-ray transient observations and provides upperlimits for non-detections. Earth blockage and detector downtime from the high particle activity in the South Atlantic Anomaly region prevent gamma-ray observatories in low Earth orbit from surveying the entire sky at a given time. In addition, the long baseline provided from a cislunar orbit allows MoonBEAM to constrain the localization annulus when combined with a gamma-ray instrument in low Earth orbit utilizing the timing triangulation technique. We present the scientific performance of MoonBEAM including the expected effective area, localization ability and duty cycle. MoonBEAM provides many advantages to the gamma-ray and gravitational-wave follow up community by reducing the search region needed to identify the afterglow and kilanova emission. In addition, the all-sky coverage will provide insight into the conditions that lead to a successful relativistic jet, instead of a shock breakout event, or a completely failed jet in the case of core collapse supernovae.

ICRC 2023 Rapporteur: Status of the Gamma-ray Astronomy field

“…This energy range (also sub-MeV) is where phenomena like the Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB) or Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are monitored. There were presentation of balloons like CXBe, the flexible X-ray detector focused on the CXB studies [1], POLAR-2, the next generation of GRB polarization detector that will be located in the Chinese Space Station (CSS) after the successful results of POLAR [2], the MoonBEAM cislunar SmallSat design [3] or XL-Calibur, a proposal for a balloon-borne X-ray polarimeter [4].…”

Detecting Magnetar Giant Flares with the Moon Burst Energetics All-sky Monitor (MoonBEAM)

“…The Moon Burst Energetics All-sky Monitor (MoonBEAM) is a proposed gamma-ray instrument intended for cis-lunar orbit with highly sensitive detectors to observe relativistic astrophysical explosions in near-real time over the entire sky instantaneously for 2.5 years [22]. The mission objective to evaluate relativistic transients produced from the mergers of compact objects,…”

“…Preliminary work based on GBM GRBs with IPN localizations has found that MoonBEAM will need to localize to ∼10 deg 2 in order to classify an MGF at the 90% confidence level and 100 deg 2 to classify sufficiently bright MGFs at the 75% confidence level. As an instrument of the IPN, the median width of timing annuli for triggered events should be of the order of several degrees [22]. In instances where the IPN cannot localize an MGF to a host galaxy, temporal and spectral analysis as discussed in Section 3, will be used.…”