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Abstract:
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is a Small Explorer (SMEX) satellite mission selected by NASA for development and scheduled for launch in 2026. COSI is a wide-field telescope designed to survey the entire gamma-ray sky at 0.2-5 MeV. It provides imaging, spectroscopy, and polarimetry of astrophysical sources, and its germanium detectors provide excellent energy resolution for emission line studies. Science goals for COSI include studies of 511 keV emission from antimatter annihilation in the Galaxy, mapping radioactive elements from nucleosynthesis, determining emission mechanisms and source geometries with polarization, and detecting and localizing multimessenger sources. The instantaneous field of view for the germanium detectors is >25% of the sky, and they are surrounded on the sides and bottom by active shields, providing background rejection as well as allowing for detection of gamma-ray bursts or other types of gamma-ray flares. In this talk, I will describe the COSI instrument design, how its operation has been verified via high-altitude balloon flights, how machine learning is being applied in some aspects of the data analysis software, and the advances that the COSI satellite mission will enable.
Bio:
Since 1994, John Tomsick has been working in astrophysics, conducting observations and developing instrumentation (X-ray polarimeter, CZT coded aperture mask concept, Laue lens, and Compton telescope) at Columbia University, UC San Diego, and UC Berkeley. John’s primary science area is using X-ray and multi-wavelength observations as a probe of the regions of strong gravity near accreting black holes and neutron stars. His work has emphasized the use of data from X-ray and gamma-ray satellites, and he has published 315 refereed papers that have been cited over 11,000 times. John has been a member of the Users Committee for four major NASA or ESA missions (RXTE, INTEGRAL, Chandra, and NuSTAR), and he is currently the chair of the NuSTAR Galactic Binaries Working Group. John has been leading the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) group and is the Principal Investigator of the COSI mission, which is a NASA Small Explorer mission. John is the Associate Director for Astrophysics and Exoplanets at Space Sciences Lab (SSL) and a member of the SSL Executive Committee.