The LOFT Burst Alert System and its Burst On-board Trigger
S. Schanne (a), D. G\"otz (a), H. Le Provost (b), F. Ch\^ateau (b), E., Bozzo (c), S. Brandt (d), ((a) CEA Saclay/IRFU/Service d'Astrophysique,, France, (b) CEA Saclay/IRFU/Service Electronique, France, (c) ISDC,, University of Geneva, Switzerland, (d) DTU Space, Lyngby, Denmark)

TL;DR
The LOFT mission's Burst Alert System rapidly detects and localizes gamma-ray bursts and transients onboard, enabling timely follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes.
Contribution
This paper introduces the LOFT Burst Alert System and its onboard trigger system, providing near-real-time detection and localization of transient X-ray sources.
Findings
Expected 120 GRB detections per year
Localization delivered in less than 30 seconds
Onboard processing enables rapid alert dissemination
Abstract
The ESA M3 candidate mission LOFT (Large Observatory For x-ray Timing) has been designed to study strong gravitational fields by observing compact objects, such as black-hole binaries or neutron-star systems and supermassive black-holes, based on the temporal analysis of photons collected by the primary instrument LAD (Large Area Detector), sensitive to X-rays from 2 to 50 keV, offering a very large effective area (>10 m 2 ), but a small field of view ({\o}<1{\deg}). Simultaneously the second instrument WFM (Wide Field Monitor), composed of 5 coded-mask camera pairs (2-50 keV), monitors a large part of the sky, in order to detect and localize eruptive sources, to be observed with the LAD after ground-commanded satellite repointing. With its large field of view (>{\pi} sr), the WFM actually detects all types of transient sources, including Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), which are of primary…
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