BurstCube: A CubeSat for Gravitational Wave Counterparts
Judith Racusin, Jeremy S. Perkins, Michael S. Briggs, Georgia de Nolfo, John Krizmanic, Regina Caputo, Julie E. McEnery, Peter Shawhan, David Morris, Valerie Connaughton, Dan Kocevski, Colleen Wilson-Hodge, Michelle Hui, Lee Mitchell, Sheila McBreen
Abstract
BurstCube will detect long GRBs, attributed to the collapse of massive stars, short GRBs (sGRBs), resulting from binary neutron star mergers, as well as other gamma-ray transients in the energy range 10-1000 keV. sGRBs are of particular interest because they are predicted to be the counterparts of gravitational wave (GW) sources soon to be detectable by LIGO/Virgo. BurstCube contains 4 CsI scintillators coupled with arrays of compact low-power Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) on a 6U Dellingr bus, a flagship modular platform that is easily modifiable for a variety of 6U CubeSat architectures. BurstCube will complement existing facilities such as Swift and Fermi in the short term, and provide a means for GRB detection, localization, and characterization in the interim time before the next generation future gamma-ray mission flies, as well as space-qualify SiPMs and test technologies for future use on larger gamma-ray missions. The ultimate configuration of BurstCube is to have a set of $\sim10$ BurstCubes to provide all-sky coverage to GRBs for substantially lower cost than a full-scale mission.