The association of GW170817 with GRB170817A proved that electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave events are the key to deeply understand the physics of NS-NS merges. Upgrades of the existing GW antennas and the construction of new ones will allow to increase sensitivity down to several hundred Mpc vastly increasing the number of possible electromagnetic counterparts. Monitoring of the hard X-ray/soft gamma-ray sky with good localisation capabilities will help to effectively tackle this problem allowing to fully exploit multi-messenger astronomy. However, building a high energy all-sky monitor with large collective area might be particularly challenging due to the need to place the detectors onboard satellites of limited size. Distributed astronomy is a simple and cheap solution to overcome this difficulty. Here we discuss in detail dedicated timing techniques that allow to precisely locate an astronomical event in the sky taking advantage of the spatial distribution of a swarm of detectors orbiting Earth.
The ASTENA mission concept under study in the framework of the H2020 AHEAD project includes a wide field monitor and spectrometer (WFM/S), mainly dedicated to GRBs. The instrument, composed by different units, is sensitive in the range 1 keV – 20 MeV. The total isotropic detection area will be ~3.0 m2 with a FOV of about 1.35 sr. The WFM will allow the detection and spectroscopic and polarimetric characterization of all classes of GRBs. Each module is a coded mask telescope that will allow the source localization within few arcmin up to 50–100 keV. The detector core is based on the coupling of low-noise, solid-state Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs) with CsI(Tl) scintillator bars. Low-energy and highenergy photons are discriminated using the on-board electronics. The instrument design and preliminary experimental characterizations are reported and discussed.
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