MEGA - Medium Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy Mission

Details MEGA - Medium Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy Mission MEGA - Medium Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy Mission

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004aas...205.0615r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 205, #06.15; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 37, p.372

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

The Medium Energy Gamma-ray Astronomy (MEGA) telescope concept will soon be proposed as a MIDEX mission. This mission would enable a sensitive all-sky survey of the medium-energy gamma-ray sky (0.3 - 50 MeV) and bridge the huge sensitivity gap between the COMPTEL and OSSE experiments on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the SPI and IBIS instruments on INTEGRAL, and the visionary Advanced Compton Telescope (ACT) mission. The scientific goals include, among other things, compiling a much larger catalog of sources in this energy range, performing far deeper searches for supernovae, better measuring the galactic continuum and line emissions, and identifying the components of the cosmic diffuse gamma-ray emission. MEGA will accomplish these goals using a tracker made of Si strip detector (SSD) planes surrounded by a dense high-Z calorimeter. At lower photon energies (below 30 MeV), the design is sensitive to Compton interactions, with the SSD system serving as a scattering medium that also detects and measures the Compton recoil energy deposit. If the energy of the recoil electron is sufficiently high (> 2 MeV) its momentum vector can also be measured. At higher photon energies (above 10 MeV), the design is sensitive to pair production events, with the SSD system measuring the tracks of the electron and positron. A prototype instrument has been developed and calibrated, and is currently being prepared for a scientific balloon flight.

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