Conveners
Plenary 8: Future Missions
- Judy Racusin (NASA/GSFC)
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is a soft gamma-ray telescope that was recently selected to be NASA’s next SMEX mission with a launch in 2026. COSI has a unique combination of excellent spectral resolution and large instantaneous field of view (>25%-sky). The mission is designed to uncover the source of Galactic positrons, image diffuse emission from stellar nucleosynthesis, and...
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 distinguishing advantage of MoonBEAM is the instantaneous all-sky coverage, maximizing the gamma-ray transients observations...
The polarimetry of gamma rays converting to an e+e- pair would open a new window on the high-energy sky with, among other things, providing insight into the radiation mechanism in young pulsars (curvature or synchrotron) or deciphering the composition of the gamma-ray emitting jets in blazars (leptonic or lepto-hadronic).
The performance of polarimeters based on homogeneous active targets...
The ASTRI Mini-Array is a gamma-ray experiment led by INAF with the partnership of
the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Fundacion Galileo Galilei, Universities of Sao Paulo,
North-West University S.A. It is being implemented at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife. The ASTRI Mini-Array will encompass nine identical Cherenkov dual-mirror aplanatic telescopes positioned at a minimum...
BurstCube is a 6U (10 x 20 x 30 cm) CubeSat launching in 2023 that is designed to expand our view of the gamma-ray sky, complementary to Fermi-GBM and Swift-BAT. It will detect gamma-ray bursts and other short-duration transients, including those that could be coincident with gravitational wave detections of neutron star mergers. It is composed of four 9-cm diameter CsI scintillator crystals...
Gamma-ray and multimessenger astrophysics are frontiers for discovery and uniquely provide access to the extreme processes that sculpt the universe. Multimessenger astrophysics is one of the most exciting and rapidly advancing fields of science. As a priority theme of the Astro2020 Decadal Survey report: New Messengers New Physics, this science is poised to revolutionize our understanding of...
