The Cherenkov Telescope onboard EUSO-SPB2 Mission, Science and Status

We present the status of the Cherenkov Telescope to be flown on a NASA ultra-long-duration balloon flight. The Extreme Universe Space Observatory on a Super Pressure Balloon 2 (EUSO-SPB2) carries a Fluorescence Telescope (FT) and a Cherenkov Telescope (CT) and is scheduled to launch in April or May 2023 from Wanaka, New Zealand as a precursor for future space-based missions to measure cosmic rays and astrophysical neutrinos via air shower's Fluorescence and Cherenkov signals. The science objectives involving the CT are to classify known and unknown sources of background, make the first observation of cosmic rays via the Cherenkov technique from suborbital altitude and perform target-of-opportunity searches in response to international multi-messenger alerts. CT will be able to slew and tilt towards neutrino transient targets and use the Earth-skimming technique to search for Very-High-Energy (VHE) tau neutrinos below the Earth's limb (E > 10 PeV). The Cherenkov telescope is equipped with a 512-pixel SiPM camera, covering a 12.8° x 6.4° (Horizontal x Vertical) field of view provided by Schmidt optics focused in stereo mode. Camera signals are digitized with a 100 MS/s readout system. We discuss the science goals, report the telescope development and integration status, and present recent field test results.