Development of the Advance Energetic Pair Telescope (AdEPT) for medium-energy gamma-ray astronomy

Abstract

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is a NASA Small Explorer mission that will carry the first focusing hard X-ray (5 -80 keV) telescope to orbit. NuSTAR will offer a factor 50 -100 sensitivity improvement compared to previous collimated or coded mask imagers that have operated in this energy band. In addition, NuSTAR provides sub-arcminute imaging with good spectral resolution over a 12-arcminute field of view. After launch, NuSTAR will carry out a two-year primary science mission that focuses on four key programs: studying the evolution of massive black holes through surveys carried out in fields with excellent multiwavelength coverage, understanding the population of compact objects and the nature of the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, constraining explosion dynamics and nucleosynthesis in supernovae, and probing the nature of particle acceleration in relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei. A number of additional observations will be included in the primary mission, and a guest observer program will be proposed for an extended mission to expand the range of scientific targets. The payload consists of two co-aligned depth-graded multilayer coated grazing incidence optics focused onto solid state CdZnTe pixel detectors. To be launched in early 2012 on a Pegasus rocket into a low-inclination Earth orbit, NuSTAR largely avoids SAA passages, and will therefore have low and stable detector backgrounds. The telescope achieves a 10.15-meter focal length through on-orbit deployment of an extendable mast. An aspect and alignment metrology system enable reconstruction of the absolute aspect and variations in the telescope alignment resulting from mast flexure during ground data processing. Data will be publicly available at GSFC's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) following validation at the science operations center located at Caltech.

Development of a telescope for medium-energy gamma-ray astronomy

“…Several gamma-ray interactions were obtained using a 5x5x9 cm 3 3-DTI prototype (de Nolfo 2008 41 ). The derived angular resolution from 13 of these reconstructed tracks, not corrected for near-field parallax, was θ 68 = ~18° (Hunter et al 2010 42 ), which agrees well with the calculated curves for AdEPT, red * in Figure 6.…”

Direct Detection of Hawking Radiation from Asteroid-Mass Primordial Black Holes

“…Several missions with capabilities in the MeV are in the proposal, planning, or construction phase. Here, we consider the following: AdEPT [29], AMEGO [30], eASTROGAM [31] (This has since been scaled back to All-Sky-ASTROGAM [32]. ), GECCO [33,34], MAST [35], PANGU [36,37], and GRAMS [38,39].…”

Snowmass2021 Cosmic Frontier White Paper:Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter

“…Likewise, INTEGRAL gamma-ray data of the masked Galactic profile has set the tightest bound on the mass of PBHs that are allowed to compose the DM [131]. Looking at the future, several telescopes have been proposed to fill the MeV gamma-ray sensitivity gap, including AdEPT [180], AMEGO [181,182], All-Sky ASTROGAM [183], GECCO [184], GRAMS [185,186], MAST [187] and PANGU [188,189]. Observations of galactic and Primordial Black Hole Dark Matter extragalactic targets with several of these telescopes have the potential to extend constraints on PBH dark matter from ∼ 5 × 10 −17 M to 1.5 × 10 −15 M , or to discover them [26,190,191].…”