NASA's BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite intended to explore the universe's maximum violent explosions, is on its way to the International Space Station.

Highlights: 

• BurstCube, a small NASA satellite, launched on SpaceX's 30th CRS mission to study short gamma-ray bursts.
• These bursts, caused by neutron star collisions, are vital for multi-messenger astronomy.
• BurstCube's detectors help locate gamma-ray burst events across the sky, advancing our understanding of these phenomena.

The spacecraft is onboard SpaceX's 30th Commercial Resupply Services assignment, which launched Thursday, March 21, at 4:55 P.M. EDT from Launch Complex forty at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. BurstCube could be unloaded aboard the station before being despatched into orbit to discover, discover, and look at brief gamma-ray bursts, which might be high-power light flashes that occur in brief.

"BurstCube may be small, but in addition to investigating these excessive events, it is checking out new technology and supplying crucial revel in for early career astronomers and aerospace engineers," stated Jeremy Perkins, BurstCube's essential investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Short gamma-ray bursts are mainly as a result of the collision of neutron stars, which are the superdense leftovers of big stars that exploded in supernovae. As neutron stars spiral collectively, they can launch gravitational waves, which are disturbances in the material of spacetime.

Astronomers are interested in researching gamma-ray bursts with both light and gravitational waves because each can provide information about various features of the event. This method is part of a new way of comprehending the universe known as multi messenger astronomy.

Currently, the best discovery of gravity waves and light from a single occasion, known as GW170817, came about in 2017.

It became a watershed moment in multi-messenger astronomy, and the sector of science has been waiting for and preparing for such simultaneous discoveries.

"BurstCube's sensors have angles which enables us to detect and localize events over a broad region of the sky," said Israel Martinez, a research scientist and part of the BurstCube group from the University of Maryland, College Park, and Goddard. "Our current gamma-ray missions are able to see roughly 70% of the sky at any given time when Earth limits their view" . Increasing the area we cover with satellites like BurstCube raises our chances of discovering more bursts that correspond with gravity wave detections.

BurstCube's principal equipment detects gamma rays with energy ranging from 50,000 to one million electron volts. (For reference, visible light has a voltage of 2 to 3 electron volts.)

When a gamma ray enters one of BurstCube's four detectors, it strikes a scintillator layer made of cesium iodide, which transforms it to visible light. The light then reaches another layer, an array of 116 silicon photomultipliers, which turns it into an electron pulse, which BurstCube detects. The team detects one pulse in the instrument readout for each gamma ray, indicating its precise arrival time and energy. The angled detectors alert the crew to the approximate direction of the occurrence.