Abstract
The Gamma-Ray Integrated Detectors (GRID) is a space mission concept dedicated to monitoring the transient gamma-ray sky in the energy range from 10 keV to 2 MeV using scintillation detectors onboard CubeSats in low Earth orbits. The primary targets of GRID are the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in the local universe. The scientific goal of GRID is, in synergy with ground-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors such as LIGO and VIRGO, to accumulate a sample of GRBs associated with the merger of two compact stars and study jets and related physics of those objects. It also involves observing and studying other gamma-ray transients such as long GRBs, soft gamma-ray repeaters, terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, and solar flares. With multiple CubeSats in various orbits, GRID is unaffected by the Earth occultation and serves as a full-time and all-sky monitor. Assuming a horizon of 200 Mpc for ground-based GW detectors, we expect to see a few associated GW-GRB events per year. With about 10 CubeSats in operation, GRID is capable of localizing a faint GRB like 170817A with a 90% error radius of about 10 degrees, through triangulation and flux modulation. GRID is proposed and developed by students, with considerable contribution from undergraduate students, and will remain operated as a student project in the future. The current GRID collaboration involves more than 20 institutes and keeps growing. On August 29th, the first GRID detector onboard a CubeSat was launched into a Sun-synchronous orbit and is currently under test.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the referee for useful comments. HF acknowledges funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the grant Nos. 11633003 & 11821303, and the National Key R&D Program of China (grant Nos. 2018YFA0404502 and 2016YFA040080X). BBZ acknowledges support from National Thousand Young Talents program of China and National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFA0404204) and The National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 11833003). This work is supported by Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program.
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Wen, J., Long, X., Zheng, X. et al. GRID: a student project to monitor the transient gamma-ray sky in the multi-messenger astronomy era. Exp Astron 48, 77–95 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-019-09636-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-019-09636-w