CubeSats for Gamma-Ray Astronomy

TL;DR

CubeSats are emerging as a cost-effective, rapid, and versatile platform for gamma-ray astronomy, enabling new scientific investigations and technological demonstrations in high-energy astrophysics.

Contribution

This paper reviews the current state, benefits, and future potential of CubeSats in gamma-ray astronomy, highlighting recent missions and scientific opportunities.

Findings

CubeSats enable in-orbit demonstrations of new gamma-ray detection techniques.

They are capable of detecting and localizing bright transients like gamma-ray bursts.

A growing portfolio of CubeSat missions is advancing high-energy astrophysics research.

Abstract

After many years of flying in space primarily for educational purposes, CubeSats - tiny satellites with form factors corresponding to arrangements of "1U" units, or cubes, each 10 cm on a side - have come into their own as valuable platforms for technology advancement and scientific investigations. CubeSats offer comparatively rapid, low-cost access to space for payloads that be built, tested, and operated by relatively small teams, with substantial contributions from students and early career researchers. Continuing advances in compact, low-power detectors, readout electronics, and flight computers have now enabled X-ray and gamma-ray sensing payloads that can fit within the constraints of CubeSat missions, permitting in-orbit demonstrations of new techniques and innovative high-energy astronomy observations. Gamma-ray-sensing CubeSats are certain to make an important contribution in the new era of multi-messenger, time-domain astronomy by detecting and localizing bright transients such as gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, and terrestrial gamma-ray flashes; however, other astrophysical science areas requiring long observations in a low-background environment, including gamma-ray polarimetry, studies of nuclear lines, and measurement of diffuse backgrounds, will likely benefit as well. We present the primary benefits of CubeSats for high-energy astronomy, highlight the scientific areas currently or soon to be studied, and review the missions that are currently operating, under development, or proposed. A rich portfolio of CubeSats for gamma-ray astronomy already exists, and the potential for a broad range of creative and scientifically productive missions in the near future is very high.