ANTAEUS Spacecraft

CubeSat for high energy astrophysics polarimetry.

The current developments in multi-messenger astronomy reinforce the importance of Compton polarimetry to a wider understanding of gamma-ray transients combined with gravitational waves detection. Furthermore, highenergy polarimetry allows a deep understanding of the physical processes, geometry and magnetic fields of astronomical sources such as pulsars, solar flares, active galactic nuclei or galactic black holes.

So far in astrophysics, only a few and limited high-energy polarimetric measurements with fine statistics have been performed, being the most reliable measurements obtained recently by polarimeter POLAR. Therefore, future missions have been proposed to fill the gap using large monolithic satellites.

Measure the level of double-events’ background noise, as well as the level of single events (photons generating a signal in one pixel only) and of multiple events (photons undergoing multiple interactions in more than two different pixels in the detector.

A small CdTe (Cadmium Telluride) gamma-ray detector (10 x 10 x 5 cm3 ), pixelated with 2 mm size pixels, will be the main scientific instrument used on the CubeSat scientific platform to record gamma-ray cosmic background (beyond the instrumental background) and strongest celestial sources of the gamma-ray Universe: the Crab Nebula and GRBs. The back-end electronics system of this CZT detector will allow time coincidence detection between pixels