The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is a 0.2-5 MeV Compton telescope capable of imaging, spectroscopy, and polarimetry of astrophysical sources. Such capabilities are made possible by COSI's germanium cross-strip detectors, which provide high efficiency, high resolution spectroscopy and precise 3D positioning of photon interactions. Science goals for COSI include studies of 0.511 MeV emission from antimatter annihilation in the Galaxy, mapping radioactive elements from nucleosynthesis, determining emission mechanisms and source geometries with polarization, and detecting and localizing multimessenger sources. The instantaneous field of view (FOV) for the germanium detectors is >25% of the sky, and they are surrounded on the sides and bottom by active shields, providing background rejection as well as allowing for detection of gamma-ray bursts or other gamma-ray flares over >50% of the sky. We have completed a Phase A concept study to consider COSI as a Small Explorer (SMEX) satellite mission, and here we discuss the advances COSI-SMEX provides for astrophysics in the MeV bandpass.
@article{arxiv.2109.10403,
title = {The Compton Spectrometer and Imager Project for MeV Astronomy},
author = {John A. Tomsick and Steven E. Boggs and Andreas Zoglauer and Eric Wulf and Lee Mitchell and Bernard Phlips and Clio Sleator and Terri Brandt and Albert Shih and Jarred Roberts and Pierre Jean and Peter von Ballmoos and Juan Martinez Oliveros and Alan Smale and Carolyn Kierans and Dieter Hartmann and Mark Leising and Marco Ajello and Eric Burns and Chris Fryer and Pascal Saint-Hilaire and Julien Malzac and Fabrizio Tavecchio and Valentina Fioretti and Andrea Bulgarelli and Giancarlo Ghirlanda and Hsiang-Kuang Chang and Tadayuki Takahashi and Kazuhiro Nakazawa and Shigeki Matsumoto and Tom Melia and Thomas Siegert and Alexander Lowell and Hadar Lazar and Jacqueline Beechert and Hannah Gulick},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10403},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
9 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, author affiliations provided on final page. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.04334