BurstCube: A CubeSat for gravitational wave counterparts

Perkins, Jeremy S.
Brewer, Isabella
Briggs, Michael S.
Bruno, Alessandro
Burns, Eric
Caputo, Regina
Cenko, Brad
Cucchiara, Antonino
de Nolfo, Georgia
Dumonthier, Jeff
Griffin, Sean
Hanlon, Lorraine
Hartmann, Dieter H.
Hristov, Boyan
Hui, Michelle
Joens, Alyson
Kierans, Carolyn
Kippen, Marc
Kocevski, Dan
Krizmanic, John
Laha, Sibasish
Lien, Amy
Martinez-Castellanos, Israel
McBreen, Sheila
McEnery, Julie E.
Mitchell, J. G.
Mitchell, Lee
Morris, David
Murphy, David
Racusin, Judith L.
Roberts, Oliver
Shawhan, Peter
Smith, Jacob R.

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Publication date

January 2020

Publisher

LSU Digital Commons

Language

English

Abstract

BurstCube aims to expand sky coverage in order to detect, localize, and rapidly disseminate information about gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). BurstCube is a\u276U\u27 CubeSat with an instrument comprised of 4 Cesium Iodide (CsI) scintillators coupled to arrays of Silicon photo-multipliers (SiPMs) and will be sensitive to gamma-rays between 50 keV and 1 MeV. BurstCube will assist current observatories, such as Swift and Fermi, in the detection of GRBs as well as provide astronomical context to gravitational wave (GW) events detected by LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. BurstCube is currently in its development phase with a launch readiness date in early 2022