The Scientific Performance of the MoonBurst Energetics All-sky Monitor(MoonBEAM)

TL;DR

MoonBEAM is a cislunar SmallSat designed for all-sky gamma-ray monitoring, enabling improved detection and localization of transient astrophysical events and providing valuable insights into relativistic jet phenomena.

Contribution

This paper evaluates the scientific performance of MoonBEAM, highlighting its advantages in all-sky coverage, localization, and its role in multimessenger astrophysics.

Findings

Effective area and localization capabilities analyzed

MoonBEAM enhances gamma-ray and gravitational-wave follow-up

Provides insights into conditions for relativistic jet formation

Abstract

MoonBEAM is a SmallSat concept placed in cislunar orbit developed to study the progenitors and multimessenger/multiwavelength signals of transient relativistic jets and outflows and determine the conditions that lead to the launching of a transient relativistic jet. The advantage of MoonBEAM is the instantaneous all-sky coverage due to its orbit, which maximizes the gamma-raytransient observations and provides upperlimits for non-detections. Earth blockage and detector downtime from the high particle activity in the South Atlantic Anomaly region prevent gamma-ray observatories in low Earth orbit from surveying the entire sky at a given time. In addition, the long baseline provided from a cislunar orbit allows MoonBEAM to constrain the localization annulus when combined with a gamma-ray instrument in low Earth orbit utilizing the timing triangulation technique. We present the scientific performance of MoonBEAM including the expected effective area, localization ability and duty cycle. MoonBEAM provides many advantages to the gamma-ray and gravitational-wave follow up community by reducing the search region needed to identify the afterglow and kilanova emission. In addition, the all-sky coverage will provide insight into the conditions that lead to a successful relativistic jet, instead of a shock breakout event, or a completely failed jet in the case of core collapse supernovae.